When most brands struggle to break through the noise online, Chris Lang and Fresh Chili Company cracked the code by doing something radically different: they started with story, not sales. In this episode, discover how a small New Mexico chili company became a top 1% Shopify store with explosive 85% year-over-year growth, a 4.96% conversion rate, and 3.74% ROAS—all while building an engaged community that devours their content faster than NBA games get views.

Chris reveals the exact strategies behind their meteoric rise, from leveraging organic social as a testing ground for paid ads to creating "addictive" content that turns customers into brand evangelists. This isn't another generic growth story—it's a masterclass in building authentic connections that drive real business results.

Key Topics & Insights:

• The Foundation-First Marketing Philosophy - Why Chris posts 7 times daily on Facebook and how he uses his Shopify product pages as a content roadmap (most brands have this completely backwards)
• The Organic-to-Paid Testing Strategy - How Fresh Chili discovers winning ads by boosting organic posts first, then scaling the winners through ASC campaigns—saving thousands in ad spend
• Search Domination Beyond Google - Why they're ranking #2 for "hatch green chili" and how they're preparing for the YouTube/TikTok search revolution (plus their ChatGPT optimization strategy)
• Community-Driven Product Development - The Facebook group strategy that turned customers into cookbook contributors and created authentic urgency through strategic "sell-outs"

The Meta Profitability Problem - Chris's candid discussion about pulling back on Meta spend and restructuring toward content-first growth for better margins

Chapters: 

(00:00) Introduction to Fresh Chile Company

(02:30) History of The Chili Capital of the World

(07:03) Keys to Success: Storytelling & Community

(11:20) Balancing Organic and Paid Strategies

(16:57) Creative Content & Testing Philosophy

(21:47) Building a Brand Story

(24:22) Search Visibility

(27:46) SEO Strategies & Content Plans

(34:20) How Fresh Chile Builds Community

‍

Chris Lang:

One of the number one things people do, especially inspired how we just pour chili on burgers. People just started kind of tagging us and in and out and Whataburger and McDonald's or Wendy's we're like, Hey, let's just get this a contest for people and get the winner 10,000.

Brett Curry:

Well, hello and welcome to another edition of the E-Commerce Evolution podcast. I'm your host, Brett Curry, CEO of OMG Commerce, and today we are going to unpack a phenomenal success story, a top 1% Shopify store, one of the coolest brands, one of the tastiest brands you'll encounter. We're going to be looking at the remarkable success of Fresh Chili Company. I've got Chris Lang on the show today of Fresh Chili Company. He also is involved in email marketing and helps run an organic social agency. And we met through Ezra Firestone's Blue Ribbon Mastermind and just overall a really cool and really smart dude. And so with that, welcome to the show, Chris Lang. And how's it going man?

Chris Lang:

Good man. Yeah, thank you for having me. Actually drove up to the mountains today. We're going to go get on a lake and some paddleboards in a little bit after this. Amazing. I had my son,

Brett Curry:

What lake? And tell the folks where you are so everyone can be jealous.

Chris Lang:

Yeah, it's New Mexico is where we're at. So Hatch, New Mexico is the chili capital of the world and just think Napa is the wine. And so we live in Las Cruces. So you travel through the desert, you travel through White Sands, and then you end up in these mountains and Ruidoso. And the name of the lake is Grindstone Lake and it's just a good place. The paddleboard fish kind of enjoy the cooler weather. It's already creeped up in the nineties, so it's in the seventies right now. So we're just going to try to take advantage of that today.

Brett Curry:

Go enjoy some cool weather. Yeah, my stepbrother actually just vacationed in New Mexico. It's like the second or third year is done and he said it's phenomenal. We live in Missouri and so I'll have to get out there and check it out. Now I am a huge hot Sauce fan, chili fan, spicy fan. Not like the so spicy that you have to wear gloves or that you pass out or faint as a hotness or anything like that, but I love a little kick. Right. So what makes Hatch New Mexico the chili capital of the world? Why is that?

Chris Lang:

Yes, I mean that's a great question. So what I love to tell people is that New Mexico is the untold story of America history. Growing up in America, you have a very much a east coast education level of America, and a lot of it's actually here in New Mexico you had kind of the Spanish missionaries coming up through Mexico and to New Mexico. And so the oldest wine region is in America, is

Brett Curry:

There in New Mexico. What part of New Mexico is that?

Chris Lang:

Yeah, so actually the southern part of New Mexico in 1629. Interesting.

Chris Lang:

The Spanish fry is planted, the first grape and the name of that grape is called Mission. So that's the name of the grape and it's just been a fertile hotbed for agriculture. And so everything from grapes to Lechuga, that's lettuce and Spanish pecans, chili cotton. So it's actually the number one producer of cons in the world, our area. It's also the number one or one of the top two to three producer of onions in America. It actually produces more onions than chili actually. And so when you think of kind the Mexican plate and fajitas, you got onions, you got peppers, you kind of got it all. I mean obviously the oldest cattle drive existed through New Mexico as well. So kind of just a really great history. History. And the Rio Grande that flows from Texas up into Colorado is really kind of the base line for agriculture in a lot of ways throughout history.

Chris Lang:

And so all the farmlands kind of hug up against the riverbed. And the Chile was kind of grown by native Peblo early on and then it was adopted by other kind of farmers. And the farmer that we work with now, his family's been doing it for six generations. They came from Italy and into the area and six generation is strong. And it's just something that, I'll tell you what it is, it's addicting. Okay. I'm just going to be totally honest with you. Okay. What is the secret? There is something about it that it's almost like the crack cocaine, and I'm not even joking. It's one of those things that the official smell of New Mexico is the smell of roasted green chili. That is the official smell. I think we're the only state in America to have an official smell because it's intoxicating that cap. And then the flavor of it is that you kind of have this kind of thick, meaty chili pod and then the flavor of it, especially when it's flame roasted, it's like nothing that anyone has experienced. And so the way that Italians kind of brought tomatoes into a Western cuisine, I really feel like that's where we're at with American cuisine over the next 20, 30 years as Hispanics are the number one.

Chris Lang:

And I think American taste palettes are getting a little spicier. That's where they want the flavor. And so it actually is closer to, it's a fruit, it's closer to a tomato than most people realize, but it's just think of it as a more flavorful, spicier

Brett Curry:

Type of tomato. Man. Sounds absolutely magical. I can't wait to visit some of those places and see the farm in person. But leading up to this, of course you hooked me up and got to order some product

Chris Lang:

From

Brett Curry:

Fresh Chili Company and I've been cooking on a Blackstone for quite some time now. Love to cook. Yes, and love making different types of burritos. I love a Cali, be a California style burrito. And so with the fresh tortillas that you cook on the griddle and then carne sada and sometimes fries, and then having the hatch green chilies. Oh my goodness. I know that may not be traditional Cali be, but come on. It was awesome.

Brett Curry:

So a few other people in my family extended family are into spice and they were raving about Hatch green chilies from fresh chili company. And so really good stuff, man. Kudos to you for creating an amazing product and telling an amazing story. And as people are listening to this, they're like, dang, this guy tells a good story. And so we're going to get into storytelling here and how you do that. I know you're all about storytelling, community building strategy to grow great brand. And so we're going to unpack that as we go, but I want to share a couple of stats about Fresh Chili Company because I think this will blow people away. It's top 1% Shopify over the last 365 years. You're up 58% roas, 3.74% mer 27% website conversion rate 4.96%, so pushing 5% on conversion rate, which is insane year to date though so far you're up 85%. So the growth rate is accelerating, which is phenomenal. And listen, it's a great, great product as we've discussed, but you're clearly doing a lot of things well. So can you unpack that a little bit for us? What have been the keys to this meteoric rise aside from just a killer product?

Chris Lang:

Yes, it's really about the story and I'll go into why and not really just have a cop out answer, right? Because as I kind of told you, Chile is a way of life in New Mexico and throughout the southwest, so west Texas through southern California and for all the transplants that moved to Florida from those places. And so my partner who he and his wife were cooking this recipe in their home for his real estate clients, and this was his dad's recipe again, it was passed down from another generation. And so they were making this product out of their home, an entrepreneur and had some success in some other industries locally here. And they reached out to me and was like, Hey, we'd like to sell this online. We think we got something here. And funny enough, my wife had actually just bought a jar around that holiday season or found a jar somehow and I tasted it.

Chris Lang:

And so Hatch has really done a good job of branding itself for chili, but I saw an opportunity that everyone was focused on retail and there really wasn't a lot of competition online. And I just saw it as an opportunity to really tell, not just my partner story, obviously that's the foundation, but I was like with this opportunity of what does Hash Green Chili do? It brings family and friends together over their favorite recipes around the dinner table. It was bringing people together. And so how did I make it the customer kind of the hero kind of really their story too. And I would say one of the biggest things we did is we had a Facebook group and it just wasn't just hash chili everything. Obviously we could have grown that really a lot faster, but we kept it around fresh chili products, specifically kind of kept it private, a little more exclusive. And then we started selecting weekly winners, recipe of the week winners, and then we turned those weekly recipe of the week when's into a cookbook. And all of a sudden those people have something tangible to show their family and friends, Hey, check out my recipe, check out my story. That is aligned also with the Fresh Chili story. And so for me, that's probably been the biggest thing that we've done is we've really just kind of, how do we bring people together over their favorite meals?

Brett Curry:

It's amazing. It's amazing. And that's really what it's about. I mean, that's the magic of food. We eat food obviously because enjoyable and we have to have it to survive. But the magic of food is the gathering, right? And the sharing and the, Hey, I want you to taste this recipe and I want you to try these fresh chilies with a chip or with the burrito or whatever. And it's a magical experience. And so you saw an opportunity to sell online, and I think we've all had this experience. We walked down the aisle at the local grocery store, and even if we're at a place, maybe it's in the local section or we're at a local health food store or something and we'll see some salsa or some chilies, but you don't know the story. You don't really know what's behind this and is it good or is it not good? I say, this show is 12 bucks, this one, six bucks. What's the difference? I don't know. And so you leaned into a channel that was leveraged, told a great story, and now it's really grown. And so I know the cool thing about what you guys are doing is you're doing a lot with organic storytelling, correct? You're also leaning heavily into paid as every good Shopify brand is to a certain degree. And so can you talk about the balance there of organic to paid? And again, I know that all kind of ties back to storytelling.

Chris Lang:

Yeah, I mean, I've been buying meta ads since 2011 I think in some way or shape or fashion. And I actually don't do this for anyone else. To me it's a very, I feel like every season of meta, I mean I feel like 20 19, 20 20 21, I feel like every year it's like every season of Meta. I like that every season of

Brett Curry:

Meta, a lot of distinct seasons.

Chris Lang:

And I remember even last year, January, February, where it was just like, man, what is going on here? And so that's where the foundation of the cooking group, organic social has really kind of I would say helped carry us through really hard times, especially when you marry it with retention, with some really solid retention strategies. Because I know when meta is sort of volatile, I can lean on my community and I can lean my retention strategies to kind of carry the brand through. Obviously if you've got some product drops and those kinds of things, that helps. But the thing that I really do now, I really marry the two strategies together. So I actually do a lot of testing of boosting organic posts, and I'm looking for buy signals and how many likes, how many comments, how many shares, how many engagements. And I've constantly just kind of always thought of them as a unified platform, whereas everyone treats them very separately, paid is doing paid and organic, is doing organic, and they don't really talk to each other. But I don't really believe in that philosophy. I believe that once you have a good strategy for both, then it really sets you up for success. Again, we're going, I think we completed our sixth year. This will be our seventh year. And it's because we have kind of both really educating people top of funnel, but also testing creative that if it's working well, we'll throw the a SE campaign and sort of let it run its lifecycle as a winner.

Brett Curry:

That's a great man. And so just to unpack that a little bit, so you're making organic post storytelling post, maybe it's a recipe, maybe it's telling what the founder is up to cooking or making things.

Chris Lang:

Exactly.

Brett Curry:

So you create an organic post, you boost it, just plain old, boost it, see how it performs, and then if it performs well, you'll turn that into an A SE ad.

Chris Lang:

Exactly. Exactly.

Brett Curry:

Nice, nice. Are you finding that a lot of your winning ads are coming from that pool of ads or do a lot of your winners come from ads you created with the intention of it being an ad?

Chris Lang:

No, I mean, if you look at our A SC library, it's going to be mostly live videos from the farm or videos that

Brett Curry:

We

Chris Lang:

Do. People really liked authenticity, and I know some brands struggle with it. Well, it's because you're a food category. How many other foods are out there too competing for the same thing? I just don't believe that. I know that we as founders are showing up every day and every week for our customers, and I think our customers see that. And a lot of people treat metal. I kind of like it to a casino now, and it almost feels like a money slot machine. And if you just want to go in and put in a quarter and try to get 50 cents back, I mean you're just playing the wrong game. You really got to tell a story.

Brett Curry:

Yeah, totally agree. I mean, if you look at what has good marketing been from the beginning of time, it's good storytelling. It's storytelling to the right audience in the right way with a clear offer attached to it. And that's really it. And I'm a firm believer that every brand is in the business of whatever they sell,

Brett Curry:

Plus they're a media company. They're in the business of getting and keeping attention and then moving people to take action. And so that really begins with a good story and the ability to tell great stories. And so let's unpack that a little bit. So you say some of your best content is on the farm, showing people where the chilies are grown. Is it a combination of that plus seeing the product? I saw a post just recently and it was like a taco or something, dipping it in the chili sauce. I was like, oh my goodness, I'm so hungry right now. But talk about what does the creative mix look like, what's working, and then maybe unpack a little bit of your creative testing philosophy.

Chris Lang:

Yeah, I'll kind of start from the back there. So I have a philosophy on meta where I'm posting up to seven times a day on Facebook and people are like, well, that's too much. Not really. I mean, people are just thumb scrolling nonstop. And I also have the stats to prove that it's working. So I'm not concerned, I don't know if every brand can do that, but we're at a place where we can do that. But the philosophy behind that is think of your Shopify product display page. You got your carousel images, you got your hero product. Then what do you have? You might have a testimonial, you might have a money back guarantee, you might have an evergreen photo. You might also have ingredients or how it's made materials. And then also one of the other ones would be how to use the product, the best case, and then marry that.

Chris Lang:

The last seventh one would be a reel, a video reel, some kind of how you're using the product. And so when you think of, Hey, I don't know what to post every day, go to your product display pages, there's your game plan. And that's basically what we're focusing on and we're really focusing on educating people every day. And then so we rotate all those posts through the entire catalog. We have over 50 plus products, and so we rotate. We have all that line, we have all those seven benefits lined up for every one of the products, and we rotate that messaging out. And I guess one thing I didn't mention was behind the scenes farm stuff that is our foundation. So most people don't have a foundation. We only focus on creative.

Brett Curry:

So

Chris Lang:

They're like, okay, we've got to be creative. We've got the ad what it is, and you're just sort of like, okay, build a foundation. It's a very simple process. It's about education now, then when we go to the farm, that's the creativity. That's the stuff that's going to move the needle for us from an ad perspective. But guess what? When we go out to the farm and we have say a jalapeno mustard, you know what, I saw that jalapeno mustard a couple weeks ago. We got to really think about how customers consideration cycles one day, seven day, whatever you want to call it. But we don't really spend enough time trying to educate them through the entire process because I was a guy who 30 day marketing plans, 90 day marketing plans, six months annual. I've done it all. But what was missing is now I don't have to do any of that because I'm just rotating through all my products.

Chris Lang:

And that's really helped us with just educating and also on conversion. And then going back to the farm thing, what set us kind of different was we always went to the farm. My partner always did a great job of making sure we get to the farm and we do some videos and we kind of just talked about the product, or maybe the farmer was there and we talked to the farmer, but one day we were driving to the farm and I was like, you know what we should do? He's like, what's that? And I was like, let's grab a cheeseburger and let's just pull down the gate of the pickup truck and then let's just pour our chili on it and eat it. And then if you see my partner, he's like, Sam Elliot meets Morgan Freeman is he? He's got the voice, he's got the look. I mean, he looks like an old Hollywood Western star. So I mean, obviously that helps a lot. I've done videos too, but the reality of it is when we did that winlock something that was crazy because these cheeseburger, there's more people that watch these cheeseburger videos than watch an NBA game now, which is really weird to think about. It's such a weird,

Brett Curry:

It's crazy. Part of that, the NBA ratings are down. I still am an NBA fan, but part of that is, man, we want authentic content and we love our food, and it's just something really, really special. So yeah, that's

Chris Lang:

Crazy. Kudos to you guys. Just really kind of marry that connection of like, oh, this has to be the freshest product because they're literally standing in front of the farm eating with it. And so that

Brett Curry:

Was just, I love how you talk about that. You start with a strategy. You start with a platform. Don't begin with a, I need to create an ad.

Brett Curry:

You start with a, Hey, what is our story? Our story is these are fresh chilies from the farm or real farm in hash New Mexico, the chili capital of the world. And these are family recipes. And we've got Sam Elliott, not literally, but your co-founders like Sam Elliott, he's the farmer. And so we're going to start with that. We'll rotate through our products. We'll try to tell these stories in a unique way. We'll do fun stuff like pop open the tailgate, eat a burger, put some chilies on it. And so you're starting with a foundation, you're starting with strategy, then you're expanding from there really makes a lot of sense.

Chris Lang:

And again, just sort of, everyone has it backwards. They do paid, they do retention, and then they're thinking about what creative they need. And it's like now you need a foundation first. And that's really, I mean, again, you and I know some really savvy Shopify entrepreneurs. I'll go and look at their organic social and there's nothing there. I'm like, you're leaving money on the table or you're leaving growth on the table or lifetime value on the table. I mean, whatever you want to call it. Does it take work? Yes, it takes work. And we also do a little bit more.

Brett Curry:

Anything worth doing does,

Chris Lang:

Right? Right. And we also do a little bit more systematic where we like and comment on posts on Instagram. We go on the explore page, we go on the reels page, we go on the search, we look for terms, we engage with posts and stories and dms and we'll DM influencers. So again, it is a strategy. It is not as just simple as just creating content, posting it. But again, I wouldn't say that it's taking more than an hour or two a day for us to do this for ourselves. And so again, I think a lot of people just don't know where to start. And I think maybe that's a disconnect because there probably hasn't been a lot of course boys on Twitter selling this kind of information. So that's probably why it doesn't exist. It's maybe not

Brett Curry:

As flashy, not as sexy, not as enticing or not as throw a switch and get results.

Chris Lang:

The number one thing people are like, well most return on results. It's like, I mean, meta holds that close to the chest because they want the attribution, right? But when you marry it with the paid, then you see the results because the ads are performing better because there's already a little bit of social proof.

Brett Curry:

Totally. Totally makes sense. Well, I want to unpack a couple of other things that you mentioned are working. One of them is search visibility. And this is interesting from a couple perspectives. One, I've been a Google guy for a long time. I'm really a fan of just any marketing that works. So that's my foundation. I love great brands. I love great storytelling, I love marketing that works. But I've been doing Google forever and did SEO back in the early two thousands. So I've always loved search. But you said organic Google is up 76% and now some chat GPT queries are up.

Chris Lang:

Yeah.

Brett Curry:

But can you talk about that a little bit? What is driving that Google growth and chat GPT growth? What's making that happen? You're talking about

Chris Lang:

My biggest pain point I'm going through right now. I'm trying to get to number one on Google for the term Hatch green chili, and I'm number two.

Brett Curry:

That's amazing. It's amazing. But the difference in traffic, as we well know from one two is pretty significant. But kudos to you, man, being number two in a highly competitive, highly contested term that is no small feat. So kudos to you.

Chris Lang:

Nah, I appreciate it. But we could just lower customer acquisition costs down if we could just get to number one. And so it's something that's interesting right now and you'll be able to talk to more brevity in this use case. But what's interesting is a lot of our social media videos that we do from Facebook are actually showing up in Google's feed.

Chris Lang:

A lot of social content is really starting to influence searches. And then chat GT again, they're opening up the Shopify brand listing. If you want to list your product on chat gt, there's a submission process right now that they're going through, but also they are pulling up information from us and from our top competitor on Google. And it's something where recipes are obviously going to be a big factor in what we do. And Backlinking, I think is probably the hardest thing that it's been the hardest thing to do for us. It probably is going to be the noodle the most for us. We're actually working with a firm right now that is trying to help us to get to number one. And the reality of it is that timeline looks like it might be August. But at the same time, I think the influence of chat right now, it's really quite compelling and not in addition to YouTube search. And so we're asking the process of going through all our hard drives, terabytes of footage, and just making clips that we can just upload to YouTube and TikTok kind of search and intent volume.

Brett Curry:

It's such a smart idea because one, YouTube is the second largest search engine on the planet behind Google. And especially for things like recipes and cooking a lot of other categories, a lot of the how-to categories that it really crushes on TikTok search is exploding. So both of those make a ton of sense. And I'm really glad you brought this up because I think there's a narrative that says, Hey, Google is going to get eaten by chat GT or Perplexity or TikTok search. And listen, I think there are some existential threats to Google out there without question. But you mentioned something, and I've actually seen this. Google's earnings are up quarter over quarter. There's more searches conducted on Google now than a quarter ago. And so they're still in good position if they play the game right

Brett Curry:

To be viable. But regardless, there's still some opportunities for you right now to lean into search. And so there's some SEO pieces that help with traditional search. I know you're talking about the AI SEO or whatever, AI optimization. I think that's really important as well. And it even ties into Google with Gemini and AI mode and things like that. And so love that you're still leaning into trying to get good quality back links. That's something that I think a lot of people have abandoned. It's still relevant, even though Google tried to say a few years ago and I wouldn't really pay attention to the backlinks they do. That was the core of Google. Google's original innovation was looking at backlinks because those are third party votes on what content to trust, they still matter. So backlinking leaning into traditional SEO into AI optimization as well. And so what all you guys doing there from a content standpoint that's helping with SEO?

Chris Lang:

I think we've kind of done it in two stages. The first SEO firm we worked with really just helped with getting a lot of technical aspects together. I didn't realize your website had to be, it was mind blowing. The amount of detail that you have pay attention to

Brett Curry:

From a crawlability standpoint, a speed standpoint, the algorithm making sense of it or the crawlers making perfect sense of it, that sort of thing. So yeah, the technical aspect of SEO does make a difference.

Chris Lang:

And then we were doing recipes and we kind of got away from that a little bit, but we're launching a new YouTube channel. And I think it's more in my thought process is we kind of got the website foundation sort of done and now we're ranking on number two. Again, I think the back linking, I think some more kind of current information obviously can help. Really we're trying to be the authority for hatch green chilies. So what does that mean? It means you just don't come to us for sauces. It means you come to us fresh peppers, frozen freeze dried powders, spices.

Brett Curry:

So we have to be hatch green chilies equals fresh chili company. That's what you're trying to create.

Chris Lang:

Exactly. And I think too, also not discounting hot honey, spicy ketchup,

Brett Curry:

Both those products are having a moment right now. I just started seeing some local pizzerias that are doing hot honey serve with your pizza and lemme tell you something that will blow your mind and we'll change the game for pizza.

Chris Lang:

It's so good. And we make an excellent hot honey. And so there's definitely those factors to consider too. But really where I see moving is we got to show up on YouTube consistently every day. And that's really the strategy that I'm implementing right now.

Brett Curry:

And it's so powerful because not only are people searching directly on YouTube, but this is something that Google announced during Google Marketing Live just about a week ago, is that there's going to be more, and you kind of alluded to this, there's going to be more visibility of video content in search results. And Google's been testing this for a while, but if I ask a question of Google and we're now seeing with Gemini, the queries of five words or more have exploded. They're up like 150% this year versus last year. So more people are searching with voice more people are searching with kind of an AI mindset rather than a traditional SEO 10 blue links mindset. And so Google's then weaving in like, Hey, here's a clip from this YouTube video that answers your question, so check it out. And so I think there's just immense value to a brand like yours consistently cranking out great content. You'll get the YouTube search traffic, you'll start getting your videos showing up in Google search, and then of course you can take that audience, that audience you're building on YouTube, monetize it with YouTube ads as well. And so just tons and tons of benefits there.

Chris Lang:

And that's where it is. I mean, what's funny is I have all these numbers up year over year, and I'll be completely transparent with where I'm at now is I'm not really happy with the business numbers from a profitability standpoint. Got it. Because meta just eats so much. And really within the last two weeks, I'm started to pull back on meta a little bit. We're about to get into chili season in July and August, so I think I can take this gamble a little bit. And if we finish up 40% or 20%, what matters is it's profitability, obviously not the vanity me of top line revenue. And I'm actually restructuring everything to be more content focused. And we're going to focus on the creative, we're going to focus on the content, and we're really going to treat, we're going to make sure our websites getting updated daily. We're going to make sure our YouTube gets updated daily. We're going to really try to do that for the rest of the year and see where we end up. So kind of an interesting approach and interesting conversation right now.

Brett Curry:

Yeah, it's so interesting. But as you look at how as a brand do we differentiate, how do we differentiate versus the competition? How do we build total enterprise value, whether we just hope to capitalize on that and take distributions and enjoy those profits for a long time, or if we decide to have an exit, having a community, having a consistent content engine so hard to duplicate, it's so hard to match when you do that really, really well. Most other competitors, most other brands just can't. And so love that you're doing that. Love that you're leaning into SEO to YouTube content, to organic social and paid social. And we're coming towards the end of our time, but you also talked about what's working is the owned channel growth, and this really ties into storytelling and being intentional with your marketing, but you got a great email list. You just put out great content. Can you talk a little bit about that? How have you built that own media

Chris Lang:

And

Brett Curry:

Then any powerful lessons from email and SMS that have helped fuel that stable growth for fresh chilies?

Chris Lang:

Yeah. What's good is we have a pretty high repeat purchase rate. So it's not a product that you sort of buy and you're like, oh, okay, that was cool. Oh, that was great. Lemme try it again. And so I think one of the things that we do kind of differently to kind of help is, again, I'm an agency guy. I'm a designer. I mean, I've worked with Virgin Galactic and done stuff for ESPN and Discovery Channel. And so I get design, I get how much brand matters. But I tell you, man, when you just write an email from the heart and sign your name at the bottom, and it's just text only. I mean, people just feel like they're right there with you kind of growing along you, it truly feels like a one-to-one

Brett Curry:

Communication.

Chris Lang:

And I think that's been one of the most helpful things that we do. And the other thing that we kind of do is we really lean into product drops and development and small batch. So they sell out. I mean, I think we're going into the season sold out of, I was actually going to try to do this for the next update next week of how many products we've actually sold out of going into this season because it's a fine line where we're trying to forecast, but also be a small batch in a way that people feel like it is exclusive, that you just can't get a retail setting. And so I think

Brett Curry:

That, and selling out a little bit's kind of cool. It really creates urgency, authentic urgency to buy the next drop because you're going to sell out.

Chris Lang:

And so I think just people know the email list is where you're going to find those opportunities is something I think that kind of helps people engaged.

Brett Curry:

Yeah, that's great. Well, last thing I want to chat about as we wrap up here. You talked about the Hatch chili challenge. What is that? How did you execute that and how's that working?

Chris Lang:

Yeah, so we did a sweepstakes giveaway that did really well for us that we won last year and just kind of got the ball rolling. We did just another 10,000 giveaway two that my partner's flying out to give a check to the winner in person, the person's in Georgia, so it's going to fly out there this Friday and do that. And we just got to thinking, okay, what else can we do? And so we're going to give $10,000 away to, it's a contest, but basically one of the number one things people do, especially inspired how we just pour chili on burgers. People just started kind of tagging us and in and out and Whataburger and McDonald's or Wendy's, we were like, Hey, let's just make this a contest for people and get the winner 10,000. And so we just launched it and people are already kind of excited and already kind of posting about it. And I think it's something too that it's just helped builds network effects and what are you eating? And I think that's what we kind of want to do is we want to create a burger revolution in America. I think that's something that we can have fun with. I

Brett Curry:

Love it, man. I love it. That is a noble cause right there at the Burger Revolution.

Brett Curry:

I like it. Chat around with it and have fun with it. Cool. And so then you're building social proof. You're building community network effect. You're also, you can use some of that content for ads. And so it's just a brilliant way to build community, leverage that for storytelling and ad growth as well. And so Chris, man, keep up with the good work. As I said, I'm a huge, huge fan. I'm a customer. I love the product. As I've introduced it to people in my family and to my community, they love it as well. And so I keep up with the good work. And now I didn't want to visit in person and see the farms and see what you guys are up to anytime I have to make that happen. But for those that are listening that're like, man, I got to try some of this stuff as well, how can they try some of your products?

Chris Lang:

Go to fresh chili co.com or you can find us on social at the Fresh Chili Co. And then I'm a sucker if you want to follow me at Crystalling Social and DM me, I might send you a gift card. We'll see.

Brett Curry:

He's a good man as far as that's concerned in all other areas. And hey, you are a really good follow on LinkedIn. Thank you. You talk about storytelling, you host a podcast as well. You share amazing clips. And so one, you got to go and just buy some fresh chilies, but also check out Chris's content, get on the newsletter, the email list, you'll get to see the marketing in action. That's a great way to learn as well, to check him out on LinkedIn. And then actually, do you want to plug your podcast, Chris, because you actually create some great content with your podcast.

Chris Lang:

Yeah, no, I appreciate it. We just launched Share Your Story. It's sponsored by SendLink, and it's something that's just about 40 days old, 45 days old, and there's response again, I'm sort of new to it, but as you kind of see, we're doing some things outside the studio. I do have studio, but today we were in Washington Park and New York City, and we were interviewing the street style interview kind of ads. Yep, yep, yep.

Brett Curry:

In on the street type thing.

Chris Lang:

Yeah. So this 21-year-old kid, his office is a park bench. And just to see the enthusiasm and the rawness of a 21-year-old entrepreneur, just really inspiring. So we're trying to just kind of share stories of how other people are kind of building in the space.

Brett Curry:

It's amazing. We'll link to that in the show notes. Check out Chris Lang on LinkedIn and all the socials and Fresh Chili Co as well. With that, Chris, thanks so much, man. This was awesome. Thanks for taking the time. Yeah, thank you. Absolutely. And as always, appreciate you tuning in. We'd love to hear more from you. If you found this show inspiring, share with a friend, share with your network, that would mean the world to us. And with that, until next time, thank you for listening.

‍

Russell Breuer, founder of Spot & Tango, shares the remarkable journey of building a $100+ million pet food company from a New York studio apartment in just seven years. What makes this story even more impressive? They've remained profitable while operating as a subscription-only, direct-to-consumer brand in the competitive pet food space. Russell reveals the strategic decisions that set them apart—from their innovative "Unkibble" fresh-dry process to building their own 70,000 square foot manufacturing facility in Pennsylvania. This conversation is packed with actionable insights on vertical integration, subscription model optimization, and performance marketing excellence.

Key Topics & Insights:

• The "Unkibble" Innovation: How Spot & Tango created a fresh-dry pet food that delivers premium nutrition without the refrigeration hassles, capturing market share at 30-40% less cost than competitors
• Vertical Integration Mastery: Why building their own $70M manufacturing facility was crucial for quality control, margins, and tariff protection—plus when other D2C brands should consider this path
• Subscription-Only Success Formula: The specific strategies for converting cold traffic into subscribers, including their 14-day trial, risk reversal guarantees, and 3-minute customer service response times
• Return on Invested Capital Framework: Russell's "North Star" metric that combines lifetime value, contribution margin, and customer acquisition cost—how this mindset keeps the entire team aligned on profitable growth
• Performance Marketing at Scale: Their balanced approach across Meta, Google, TikTok, and direct mail, plus why that "grainy office photo" outperformed studio-produced creative assets

This episode is essential listening for any D2C founder looking to build sustainable, profitable growth while maintaining premium positioning in their market.

Chapters: 

(00:00) Introducing Spot & Tango: The Value Proposition of Fresh Pet Food

(06:15) The Importance of Vertical Integration

(11:56) Subscription-Only Model: A Strategic Choice

(15:52) Key Lessons for Increasing Conversion Rates

(19:03) The Role of Education in Customer Engagement & Relationships

(23:09) Understanding Return on Invested Capital

(28:58) Growth Levers & Marketing Strategies

(32:29) The Role of AI in Performance Marketing

(35:05) What’s Next for Spot & Tango

‍

Russell Breuer:

It's not set it and forget it. We continue to work at it. We continue to try different things and really push the envelope. I think that's one of the reasons why we've been successful on the performance marketing side.

Brett Curry:

Well, hello and welcome to another edition of the E-Commerce Evolution podcast. I'm your host, Brett Curry, CEO of OMG Commerce, and today we are talking to a really remarkable founder of an amazing brand with an amazing story. Talking to Russell Breuer from Spot and Tango. Listen to this, a hundred million in revenue, profitable, almost exclusively DTC subscription only. Amazing value prop in the marketplace are doing some amazing things. They're vertically integrated, which in a world of tariffs and no tariffs or uncertainty and all that craziness, that is a brilliant play. And so lots to unpack, lots to discuss, lots to learn from. So excited that you're here. And with that, welcome to the show, Russell. How's it going man? And thanks for taking the time.

Russell Breuer:

Awesome, thanks Brett. You hit some key highlights. We're excited to be here seven years into the journey. Still a lot of wood to chop, but it's been very rewarding and happy to share some of my experiences today.

Brett Curry:

Love that. A lot of wood to chop, man, that is the game, right? The game is always, I'm going to do this thing and then I'm going to go build this mode and then competitors catch up. I got to keep going. Things like that. It's a never ending game, but hey, that's what we signed up for as entrepreneurs and so we just got to enjoy it. What I'd love to do, Russell first, because as with any great product, any profitable company, it starts with meeting and need and being different. And so how did you kind of come to the value prop and explain it to people, what you sell and why it's so special in the market?

Russell Breuer:

Sure. So Spot and Tango is a pet health and wellness brand. In short, we make incredible food for dogs. It's a mission-driven brand. All of our products use fresh human grade, whole ingredients. We exclude anything artificial, no synthetics, no food colognes, no fillers. Really. The founding story hearkens back to a studio apartment in New York City, which is cliche but true. My wife was cooking fresh meals for our Golden doodle jack. In fact, her mother was cooking fresh human grade meals for her dog, George. So there's a family history here and of course aspirations to be an operator and entrepreneur. I was head scratching why and explored the space and looked into the category and our belief is that health and wellness as a right, not a luxury. And what started as really a bootstrapped, incubated concept, we found vets and nutritionists to develop recipes that meet the nutritional needs of dogs for all life stages.

Russell Breuer:

And it's really studio to incubate our kitchen to a hundred million dollars plus business in seven. It's amazing. It's amazing. It's been a big wave, but the mission remains true. Again, everything that we produce, all products, all ancillaries, treats, supplements, our fresh line Unkibble, which we can talk about, it's all whole fresh human grade ingredients and that's what we do. It's all delivered online. So we are a subscription model. It's all personalized. We learn a lot about your dogs age, weight, and activity level to really inform the portion, the caloric portion per meal, per day per dog. So personalization's a big point, but we're digital junkies. It's what we do. It's all online. The value prop, it's convenience. Skip the trip to the pet store and Pon Tango shows up. That's the high level

Brett Curry:

That, dude, you're speaking my language. And as we were prepping, you were talking about performance driven, conversion focused marketing, which that's been my world since the beginning of my career, and so love hearing that as well. But let's talk about Unkibble just a little bit because you and I we're also talking before we hit record. There's some other food products on the market that are fresh food, but they come cold and you got to put 'em in your refrigerator next to your food, which I love Our dogs, my family, especially my wife and my kids, huge animal lovers. So we take care of our pets. I don't really want my food next to my dog's food, just my personal opinion. But what is Unkibble and how are you differentiated in that regard?

Russell Breuer:

Yeah, so Unkibble offers the benefits of fresh and the convenience of Unkibble. Back in 2019, again, the original recipes were fresh, fresh, frozen. And to your point, it's expensive and it's inconvenient. For an example, urban City Center, the freezer, Aviva German Shepherd, you're choosing either dog's, food and freezer or your own, okay, park the Bengal Bites on the counter. So really is in response to customer feedback. And the question was, is there another way of the mountain? Is there a version mission-driven that's shelf stable that delivers pound for pound the same ingredient integrity? And the answer is un Unkibble. We call it fresh dry again. So we use all the same fresh she in grade ingredients, but we take out the water through a very novel, fresh, dry process. No water removes the need to freeze, it removes the dry ice, it removes the installation in the box. Those savings get passed along to the consumer. So what we're offering is affordable health and wellness. And from a pricing perspective, on average we're 30 to 40% less.

Brett Curry:

It's amazing.

Russell Breuer:

And other fresh brands you may have heard about. And so we're occupying a unique white space from a pricing perspective where we're attracting a lot of aspirational consumers, Unkibble consumers who want to feed their health and wellness, but they want the convenience, it's scoop and serve in the pantry personalized. And they don't want to deal with the headache of, oops, I forgot to defrost my frozen food overnight. Right? Right now my dog's eating ice cubes. So we're in a very different business and we've been doing that since we launched Unkibble in April of 2020.

Brett Curry:

It's brilliant. I think it strikes the perfect cord, kind of threads the needle of exactly what people want. We don't want to feed our dogs junk, and that's become very, very clear that most of what we'd be feeding our dogs is junk, but we also don't want the inconvenience sharing freezer or fridge space or whatever. And so love what you guys have done there. I know a big part of that is your vertical integration and your manufacturing facility in Allentown, pa. And as we talked about in the intro, in a world of tariffs on and off and all kinds of craziness, you guys look like absolute geniuses having your own facilities here. So talk about that decision. Why did you do that and what does that unlock for you and for your customers?

Russell Breuer:

Great question. It's been an incredible journey for the vertical integration build your own factory piece. Yes. In hindsight, it looks like we had the perfect crystal ball. I can assure you at the time we were focused on the supply side, we launched Unkibble in April, 2020. We tell this story that our first purchase order we thought would last six plus months. We sold out in four days in very short order, one co manufacturer turned into six co-manufacturers and they couldn't keep up with demand. There's questions on costs of goods margin. You're shipping freight all over the country between comans to logistics centers, product consistency, there's a number of

Brett Curry:

Questions. Quality control. Yeah, consistency. When you got six different

Russell Breuer:

All over the co, if you asked six people to make a chocolate chip cookie, the cookie is going to look a little bit different. We took that to heart and we decided shortly after launch, having Unkibble that building our own factory and owning our own supply chain was very important. We have now constructed a 70,000 square foot facility in Allentown, Pennsylvania. It's about two hours west of New York. We have a hundred people on site. It's been a huge win for us. It's amazing. We push all the volume through that facility. It's unlocked, tremendous margin wins, it's boosted inventory, it's hedged against stockouts. We we're rapid innovators. And I think the most important point for us, when you think about the food landscape within the pet category, most brands don't manufacture their own products.

Russell Breuer:

They

Russell Breuer:

Don't know where the ingredients come from. They're not involved procurements, they don't understand food safety plans. They don't understand quality control. They don't understand packaging, shipping or logistics. They are marketeers selling somebody else's product as their own, which is a reality that's existed since the beginning of time.

Russell Breuer:

Sure.

Russell Breuer:

Which is fine for us. We take ingredient integrity very seriously and delivering an exceptional customer experience. And our Allentown facility has been the tool, the enabler of that since we own every facet of supply chain, that for us has been an incredible differentiator in this space as we are the leaders in fresh dry, in a fantastic moat and something frankly that most people just aren't doing. And then to your point, yes, the phone rings now and gosh, you guys tariff proof, resilient. You know what the answer to that question is? Yes. Did we know? So at the time, no. It was a bit of a false send and here we are and we're reaping the rewards.

Brett Curry:

I love it, man. I love it. I know this isn't the path for everybody for a variety of reasons, but what did you learn in that process of going vertically integrated and what advice would you give? When do you think other DTC brands might consider taking the path that you took?

Russell Breuer:

Sure. I think the business case needs to be very strong product market fit firstly, and depending on growth rate. And look, ultimately there are thousands and tens of thousands of brands that outsource production A okay, my point was more within the pet space, and so that's fine, but for us, demand, outstripped supply significantly. So there was a need. So rapid product market fits is one two, unity economics is the second consideration. Are you better outsourcing or insourcing? And in many cases, depending on the category, it's better to have someone else. If it's a commoditized trade, it's better to have someone else do it. And you focused on what you do best, whether that's marketing or

Brett Curry:

Marketing, sales, whatever. Yeah,

Russell Breuer:

Exactly. And then ultimately when it comes to actually building a facility, give yourself a long lead time. Like two years. Okay. This

Brett Curry:

Is not overnight notes. We're not spinning this up in six months. This is not our tariff for leaf plan. This is like I'd say thoughtful, intentional, strategic. Yeah,

Russell Breuer:

Exactly right. Brett, I think at a sprint it's 18 months if not two years. Identifying a site, obviously there's a bill design firm involved, there's CapEx, there's equipment, there's staging capital, there's equity, there's debt, there's a lot of pieces involved and team to bring that to life. And of course operating a facility brings a number of other challenges that we've managed and managed well. But nonetheless, there's an early consideration set. But I would say that having your own assets, having your own manufacturing unlocks significant intrinsic value for any company in any more. I think a lot of brands that are winning do own those types of assets and the strategic landscape looks at and says, these are different. Haven't seen that playbook.

Brett Curry:

Yeah, love that. Totally agree with that for sure. So you guys are subscription only. Was that the plan from the beginning or was that a pivot over time? Why did you guys land on that and what have been the pros and cons of going that route?

Russell Breuer:

Great question. So day one, yes. At the person personalized product firstly. So we have kind of an onboarding questionnaire. We learn about your dog's weight activity level to really inform portion or calories consumed per day subscription is fit for the pet category. Why is that dogs need, it's not a want, it's a need. Subscription is a convenience, it's a value prop. You don't need to go to the pet food store. It shows up on a regular cadence. On average, for us it's every four weeks. Customers love it. We're building out broader product platform with treats and supplements and other food products as well. Dental care, which we're launching soon, which we can talk about. But because that need exists, people need the box every four weeks. And so for us, it's always been that way from a reoccurring revenue perspective, commercially speaking, that's certainly a way to scale business. Brilliant. And I think the other point here is within the pet landscape, dogs do need consistency of diet. We don't advocate the dogs to change proteins every day. This is not Turkey on a Monday, beef on a Tuesday, lamb on a Wednesday. That can be a disaster for the Persian rug digestion important. So consistency of diet is also very important and that also leans towards a subscription model. So it's very fit for purpose for the category.

Brett Curry:

Totally makes sense. It fits the value prop for the consumer in terms of the pet owner, but also for the pet and also for you guys. So perfect alignment there across the board. Curious, what have you guys learned? What have you done to make that Yes, easier for shoppers? Because I know a lot of people will probably hear the story and hear the value prop and think, I want that for my dog, but what if they hate it? What if I hate it? What if something like that. So how do you get someone to take that initial leap? They've never seen the food, they've never held the bag, they haven't seen it in store. To immediately go yes to a subscription. How have you made that an easier yes.

Russell Breuer:

Right. So firstly, it's a considered purchase. So we're not selling tennis shoes or to your point, what is this thing? I've been feeding my dog Unkibble since the beginning of time. Why are you using fresh human grid ingredients? There's a lot of education. Firstly, I'd say we use a lot of email marketing and funnels on SMS to continue that education. The pros, the benefits of these types of recipes. We use a trial also, so there's a 14 day trial, there's a happy pup guarantee. These are our tools to give consumers comfort, that

Brett Curry:

Risk reversal guarantees type of thing.

Russell Breuer:

All of the above. And I think it gives people, look, I think the landscape's changed. I think obviously e-commerce is playing a greater role in purchase decisions and people have greater comfort online disclosing their credit card details, receiving a box in the mail when they haven't maybe heard of these brands previously. Our job is to educate, give people comfort that we're here to support them. And then we have an incredible customer service team. We're available on SMS, email chat, voice messages, don't go unnoticed for days. They are responding. It's amazing lesson. So it's those multiple touch points that I think builds a relationship and that's unique to direct to consumer. We have a direct relationship with our customers. They tell us what's working well, they tell us things that we can fix or improve upon. They inform new product innovation and it's an amazing first party. Data is an amazing dynamic and again, our job to serve the customer, but those are some of the tools that we use initially to help give people the idea that we're here for them, give 'em comfort to make that purchase decision.

Brett Curry:

It's amazing. As with most things, when you're building a great business and running great marketing or building great offers, it's not just one thing that you do that kind of creates the unlock. It's lots of little things, stacking lots of little things to create a delightful experience. But what would you say are the biggest levers, the biggest levers or the biggest lessons in increasing conversion rate? Increasing the number of people that take you up on subscriptions.

Russell Breuer:

Yeah, I think when you think about the marketing funnel, and we're very much focused on direct response, lower funnel, I'd say consistency of call to action. What you're advertising in terms of product image and copy, is that experience replicated on site, on homepage or landing page is the consistent checkout Is pricing consistent? It's the no surprise rule. What we promise we deliver through the funnel through checkouts following through post conversion as far as onboarding with email or otherwise. So I think that's really important. Supply chains

Brett Curry:

Also, one thing I'll kind of interject there because it's such a great point, Russell, is we talk about you don't want to create whiplash where it's like I see an ad, I see an offer that looks great, I click on it and then I'm like, wait a minute, where am I now? And what is this

Russell Breuer:

Exactly?

Brett Curry:

And if it creates a disconnect or whiplash almost, man, it's hard to overstate how impactful that is negatively. So

Russell Breuer:

That's right.

Brett Curry:

Really let call that up.

Russell Breuer:

I completely agree. I think rapid AB testing informs that consumer feedback informs that. And look, everyone's busy. There's many distractions online. People always ask who are your competitors? And look, e-commerce, we're all competing for clicks, right? We're all competing for your attention online. And so totally in terms of the marketing funnel, that's one point. And then look on the supply chain side, maybe Amazon ruined the party, but people expect product to be delivered soon thereafter. Once you check out, they want that box within one, two days max. And so we've spent a great deal of time ensuring that we can do that. We work with four distribution centrals across the country for business. And so monitoring that one to two day shipping, radius delivery accuracy, all of the above, that's really important. That's important for retention. And again, to my point about food being a need versus a want, food can't be late, right? And it's late three or four days. Again, maybe you can

Brett Curry:

Wait, looks like you're fasting for the next couple of days. Fido doesn't work, doesn't work, yeah,

Russell Breuer:

It doesn't work. Maybe your tennis shoes can be delayed but not your food. And so that's another really important point here. And then expectation management with our customer service folks have a lot of questions about, again, back to the benefits. How do I transition to this new diet? How often should I expect this? I want to try a new recipe. I have multiple dogs, all of the above. There's a lot of education handholding. And so we've invested significant resources in our customer service team and our kind of customer data tech to ensure that we are in rapid response mode in education mode at all times.

Brett Curry:

That's amazing. Let's talk a little bit about the education piece. So you've kind of broken it down. It sounds like there's definitely an education piece upfront. So you're competing for that click, getting someone to the website, maybe they're signing for your email list, you're educating them on why Unkibble, why this process? How is this going to work? So there's some upfront education, there's then education after someone becomes a customer. Can you talk through that? What have been some of the big lessons you've learned there and some unique things you do in terms of education?

Russell Breuer:

The most important consideration upon purchase is ingredients. And we've learned that through Hotjar. Heat maps on websites, iterate surveys, talking to our customers directly, voice of customer people have always said the first consideration when considering a new diet or new food is what's in it, right? And I think ultimately the consumer is much more educated than maybe they used to be. We have very simple ingredients. It's very straightforward. There's no confusion. If you look at a pet food label, if you have a dog, it's confusing. We're that. That's one point. And so that education piece is like, here's what it is. I think two reinforcing vertical supply chain story about this is where it's made, this is how it's made. Again, that builds confidence in our brand. And then

Russell Breuer:

Ultimately there's a lot of touch points after purchase in terms of the inbox experience with feeding guides or brochures, continual education, whether it's in regards to new product launches or breed specific data. We have content marketing, a blog if you will, called what the Pup, which is really talking about love that parenting and pet issues. Is it okay for your dog to sleep in the bed? I'd rather spend more time with my dog than my spouse talking about breed specific information or what diets would work or what to do with your dog's paws in the winter or in the summer. So again, it's this kind of ongoing relationship. And honestly, it's not all about selling product, it's about building a relationship. Pet parents too. And I still have a ton of questions and I've been doing this for a long while. I've 80 pound English golden retriever named Sully who takes up half house's, my fourth child, and I ask her that questions often. So again, we want to be a resource. So it's not only providing food, it's being a resource and supporting the pet parent too.

Brett Curry:

It's so important and that education piece upfront, but also understanding the education doesn't really stop. I had a great experience recently with these amino acids that I purchased for myself, trying to follow a pretty strict workout program and have for years, but I'm 45 now. It's like building and keeping muscle masses hard. So I bought these amino acids based on an influencer's recommendation, but then I got this great guide to amino acids in email after the purchase. It was talking about, Hey, how you should use this 30 minutes before workout, take it immediately after workout. Here's how you can take it, how it differs from protein and creatine and all these other things. And I'm like super helpful. I feel like I understand fitness decently well,

Russell Breuer:

But

Brett Curry:

I felt more empowered. I'm taking more of the product, I feel better as well. I started ordering more. And so it's just one of those things where I think we underestimate the value of education post-purchase because that's going to create sticky relationships, more referrals, more all the things we want, plus happier pets and happier pet owners.

Russell Breuer:

That's it. And that speaks to channel as well, right? Yeah, so any direct to consumer brand, whether you're in pet wallet, razors meal kit or otherwise, there's an opportunity to educate versus on shelf. So on shelf it's unpacked, but once that purchase decisions takes place, a person leaves store, that relationship doesn't exist. And so that's part of the power we have from this channel of acquisition.

Brett Curry:

It's amazing. Yep, totally, totally agree. Okay, so you'd said something when we were prepping very unique. I've been in this m and a space and I have some friends in private equity and we're looking at acquiring a couple agencies and things like that. So you mentioned return on invested capital. That is not a term that I hear marketers use a whole lot. Not a term that's really come up on this podcast a whole lot. So how do you guys look at return on invested capital to measure and manage your growth and related to marketing? And I will say just another bit of context, I think I'm really delighted that there's this trend towards marketing and finance becoming friends and how, and I know you're a direct response guy, I've been doing, I started doing DRT V in the early two thousands and so direct response tv. And so I've always lived in this world, but it's really a trend in e-commerce of hey, let's get finance and marketing communicating and let's make sure we're getting good return on our marketing dollars. But even then, I don't hear people talk about return on invested capital. So why is that a metric for you? What kind of insights does that unlock? Unpack that a bit for us,

Russell Breuer:

It's our north star, our ops, our finance, our marketing, the entire organization speaks this language. A lot of direct to consumer. Brands have learned hard lessons. Growing top line and hypergrowth with product market fit is possible for many businesses. If you understand performance marketing, meta search, TikTok, direct mail, you can generate outsized returns on the growth side. But oftentimes brands forget about the unique economics. They forget about things like net income, cashflow, ebitda, and they've learned hard lessons years later when they look to exit or go public and third parties deeply discount valuation or otherwise.

Russell Breuer:

Totally, totally.

Russell Breuer:

So I think that's a starting point for a mind shift in terms of how we've operated this business. We are very prudent operators. And what I mean by that is prudent growth. So return on invested capital really is a measure of our marketing spend and it combines three key metrics, lifetime value, contribution, margin, and customer acquisition cost. Okay, it's beautiful. It's beautiful. When we spend our dollars on any channel, let's say we spend, I'll give you a very rough example. Let's say we spend a million dollars on marketing today. I'm now minus a million dollars. The question is how soon do I repay that a million dollars and get to zero? That's one x return on invested capital. And then how long does it take to generate a million dollars of profit?

Russell Breuer:

And so we look at the lifetime value of our customers. In other words, how much do our customers spend on average per year? That's my numerator. Multiply that by the fully loaded contribution margin in the business. So what is my average profit per customer per year? And then I divide that by the customer acquisition cost and that informs the timeline to repay my investment in marketing. We use that paradigm to inform everything that we do, such that there are caps in terms of how much we are willing to invest in marketing in terms of customer acquisition cost. Of course if our LTV or our average revenue per customer increases over time and our margin increases, we can spend more dollars at a higher acquisition cost. But we use that framework and route everything we do in that framework and that ensures that our operations team, our customer service team, product innovation, they're thinking about we need to boost retention, we need to find margin wins, we need to figure out higher LTV, we need to figure out channels of acquisition that are more efficient. We need to rapidly AB test. Is our creative strategy working? How do we actually get CAC lower on that or search? And so when you combine those elements, that has enabled us to be a nine figure business and be profitable. And we've had that mentality really since inception. And I think ultimately that the other reality is data. You've got to understand

Russell Breuer:

From day one, if you're spending a dollar on market and you've got to know attribution, how do you allocate your money and does that dollar go far? Are you acquiring a customer in a subscription business? If you acquire a customer and they churn 10 days later, that's not good for business. What percent of your customers are churning in second order or third order? So the sooner you are aware and understand the data that will inform and can lead to this type of ROYC equation and that really drives decision making.

Brett Curry:

Yeah, it's so good man. And it's one of those things where, yeah, looking at lifetime value, looking at contribution margin, looking at customer acquisition cost, creating these KPIs where your entire team is seeing it and managing against it, it's what matters. It's what matters most. And so you've got alignment across the team on it. And I'm going through the book right now, Moneyball, I dunno if you've seen the movie or the book, but it's so good. And it's one of those things where they're kind unpacking this guy, bill James who kind of revolutionized baseball metrics. He created Saber Metrics is the title that he gave it. But he's like, Hey, looking at rbis and looking at batting average, that just tells a really weird part of the story. But what matters is on base percentage and slugging percentage without getting inside baseball, he unpacks why that matters. It's like that's how you manufacture runs and that's how you manufacture wins. Those are the numbers that matter and there's some other things they measure too, but getting that kind of clarity and getting that clarity across the team, man, it's valuable. So kudos to you guys for getting that clear.

Russell Breuer:

It's part of our onboarding. We talk about it incessantly throughout the organization and again, I would advocate any brand really uses those types of metrics.

Brett Curry:

Yeah, yeah, it's really, really great. So that's awesome. Let's talk growth levers for a little bit. So I mean you guys have experienced some great growth and it's all within the constraints or with the guardrails of your return on invested capital, but what have been your best growth levers over the years? What's really allowed you to scale?

Russell Breuer:

So we have a balanced playbook between meta search or Google TikTok affiliates, influencer direct mail. We've been experimenting with OTT over the top and also linear television. You could argue some of these are very lower direct response channels, other are more mid funnel. We haven't spent and invest as much in top of funnel things like billboards or subway cars or wild pasting or otherwise. I think that's intentional because ultimately our belief is that in impressions and an impression, and you may be spending dollars on meta and getting a million impressions and fewer conversions, but nonetheless you're still getting brand awareness. So you could argue that lower funnel is both lower and top and mid, correct. There are different both at the same time. Exactly. And I think that's oftentimes it falls on deaf ears because more traditional brand marketers think they need a billboard in Times Square to justify proper funnel investment. We see lower funnels as kind of serving both purposes. But look, we've got a performance marketing playbook. I think for us, two big differentiators. One we focused on building on incredible team internally that focus, we have channel specific buyers focused that are pulling lever in-house, that's really important. And then two creative. We are in the entertainment

Russell Breuer:

Business at the end of the day,

Russell Breuer:

Totally

Russell Breuer:

Busy on the go parents, they're getting solicited for clothing, food, SaaS services. There's a lot of distractions. And so

Russell Breuer:

Creative is key and it's all about feeding all of these channels, whether it's meta or otherwise with a lot of options. AB test created and maybe iteration, a slight iteration on creative. It may be woman with dog with then Unkibble in park and then it's copy test A and you can run the same image, but copy test B, copy test C. In fact, some of our best performing creative, we took a grainy photo of Unkibble on shelf in our office with a post-it note sale that we ran and we tested that versus studio produced assets, gifs, you name it, and the grainy photo because it looked realistic. It is

Brett Curry:

Looked authentic. It was authentic. Yeah.

Russell Breuer:

People identify with that. That's why GC user generated content plays quite well, but ultimately it's not set it and forget it. We continue to work at it. We continue to try different things and really push the envelope. I think that's one of the reasons why we've been successful on the performance marketing side.

Brett Curry:

I love it, man. And one of the best pieces of advice I ever heard was any business should view themselves as in the business they're in plus their media company. Plus you're in the business of getting, keeping attention, driving some sort of action. And at the core of that really is creative testing. I've always been a media guy and a strategy guy. I love that stuff, but I love creative too. And really creative is the biggest lever that we have now and into the future. And certainly AI and other things are going to enable more rapid testing and more rapid expansion, things like that. While we're on the topic, we didn't really plan on this, but any insights or any perspectives on how AI is going to change performance marketing or e-commerce in general or your business? Any POVs on ai?

Russell Breuer:

Absolutely. No, we are all exposed to it. It's topical innovations here. I think it's a wonderful, we're looking at AI from both workflow automation on the ops side. We're working with it on the performance marketing side in terms of either creative ideas or creative iterations and helping AI to inform how rapidly creative gets tested in platform and helping us make some of those decisions. We're using it on the coding side. I won't mention all the vendors we're working with. But nonetheless, even on the coding side, there's suggestive code to help our engineers actually iterate faster when they're in the development cycle. And so customer service as well, there are tons of opportunities where you can start to not automate everything. We're still a very high touch business, but nonetheless, there are some very standardized questions that are better served through automation, not FAQs, but where is my order?

Russell Breuer:

Totally, totally

Russell Breuer:

Necessarily to give a tracking number or provide guidance to where boxes. So we're looking at AI across all functions of our business really to improve efficiency and ultimately compliance in many ways and push the envelope. I would argue AI is not going to replace everybody ultimately in a hightest, totally,

Russell Breuer:

Totally.

Russell Breuer:

Humanity will rule, right? People do like having conversations and asking questions and there's TLC that customers expect when we're talking about their dogs in particular. But look, AI is here and I think there's a steep learning curve for a lot of brands, but there's a lot of folks out there having the conversation. I think ultimately it's going to be beneficial for all of us.

Brett Curry:

Yeah, I 100% agree. That's what we view it. And I've got a very run, very people driven business. Our greatest expense is people. We can't scale without people. And I have the same view where one, I think at a base level, AI is allowing us to do the things we just have not ever had time to do. So that's part of it's allowing us to do some of these things we would love to have done but just haven't been able to. So that's one layer, but then it just supercharges your best people and becomes personal assistant, personal strategist, executioner to make people more productive and better. And so yeah, we're very bullish on ai. We're testing it in lots of different ways. So yeah, I think that's a great perspective. As we wrap up, we'd love to hear what's next for Spot and tangle. It sounds like you got a big product release coming up, or actually at the time of this release, we'll just come out, but talk about that product release, talk about what's next for the brand.

Russell Breuer:

Great. We are very excited. We are building product platform. So we have our food, we have UNC Unkibble, we have our fresh recipes. We sell treats and supplements. Again, addressing all the needs states of the consumer. We know a lot of our consumers feed supplements or treats, even a third feed supplements. So there's ways and we've used that input to launch new products. The human grid version of that product for pets, the dental care solution is the game change. It comes out next week, you'll hear more about it nonetheless. It is a scientifically proven two years in r and d. The big game change here is a lot of the existing dental care products in the marketplace are really physical in nature. There's a physical mechanic that scrubs the dog's teeth, periodontal disease, it's a problem for dog penetration with dental care products within the pet food landscape or pet category is very low.

Russell Breuer:

I think there's a lot of education required. The worst case scenario is your dog gets periodontal disease and ends up at the vet and spends $2,000 for a cleaning or teeth removal or otherwise. This product does two things. There's a very novel ingredient, a novel fermentate that reduces oral biofilms. What does a biofilm is bacteria that leads to plaque on a dog's teeth, plaque leads to bad odor. This product actually removes those biofilms. So there is a scientifically proven mechanism to do that in addition to the brushing. So it's health and wellness, it reduces plaque, it reduces bad odor, it fights periodontal disease. It's a big game change. We're excited. We think it's another tiger by the toe, if you will. And Unkibble has been a hero product and we think this product will be one as well. Yeah. So we've been scaring away behind the scenes and it goes live next Monday, June 2nd.

Brett Curry:

It's amazing. And it's one of those things where I think that's so well aligned with who your target buyer is and what they care about. And yeah, just a huge tam there for you to tap into. And so that's really exciting. And then one thing I was curious about there, I know that there's been really some education over the last few years on human health and how really oral health for humans impacts so much of the rest of your health, right? You could be healthy in a lot of ways, but don't take care of your mouth. And that has an impact on potentially the rest of your body. I'm assuming it's got to be the same to some degree with pets.

Russell Breuer:

Exactly. It's all connected. And this is holistic health and wellness. It's not just here's a single ingredient treat or here's a supplement. It even comes, it

Brett Curry:

Sounds a breath mint it serving a real health purpose.

Russell Breuer:

And to your earlier point about being really health conscious and focused on exercise, it's the same with your dog. Healthy exercise, going for a walk. It's really a mentality. It's not just scoop and serve and it fixes all problems. You need to really embrace that. An active lifestyle is really important. You need to think about all aspects, all moments of consumption and dental care is no exception to that.

Brett Curry:

It's awesome. It's awesome. Well, Russell, this has been an absolute pleasure. Kudos to you guys on building a great brand, a great product, a great offering is loyal following people love you, pets and owners alike. And so I'm excited to see where you guys go and grow from here. I'm definitely a fan. And so for those that are listening, they're like, man, I got to get on this Unkibble Train and I got to check out what Spot and Tango is up to. How can they learn more? How can they figure out what their pet needs?

Russell Breuer:

Spot and tango.com, all information's there, whether it's Un Unkibble or our treats or supplements in this new dental care product. Spots and tango.com, we offer discounts on trial. It's a 14 day trial with a happy pup guarantee. So there's no reason not to give us a try. And Brett, thank you so much. Amazing, fantastic opportunity. Really enjoyed the conversation. Again, thanks for the opportunity here.

Brett Curry:

Absolutely. Russell Breuer, ladies and gentlemen, Russell, good luck to you and Spot and Tango and look forward to watching the future success. Super exciting. And as always, we'd love to hear from you. So I'd love to hear feedback. What would you like to hear more of on the podcast? If you found this episode inspiring, please share it with somebody else. And with that, until next time, thank you for listening.

‍

What happens when you build a company specifically to sell it—and then execute that plan? 

Liz Saunders went from running registration at Seller Summit to delivering the closing keynote, all while building Fluencer Fruit, the Chrome extension that helps Amazon Influencer creators optimize their content strategy. In this powerful episode, Liz reveals her entire exit playbook, from reading "Exit Preneur" before she even started building to keeping GAAP-compliant books from day one. But this isn't just an acquisition story—it's a masterclass in understanding the Amazon Influencer ecosystem, where creators earn 1-4% commissions and brands are discovering that video converts better than text, and UGC converts better than brand videos.

Key Topics & Lessons:

• The Strategic Exit Playbook - How Liz built Fluencer Fruit knowing she'd sell within 3-5 years, why she hired a bookkeeper from day one to keep GAAP-compliant records, and how a single LinkedIn comment led to her acquisition by Wayward through a consulting relationship
• Amazon Influencer Program Deep Dive - The difference between driving traffic (TikTok/social) vs. converting traffic (on-site Amazon videos), why commission rates vary from 1-4% based on product categories, and how brands can unlock video carousel placements to boost conversions
• Commission Stacking Strategy - How creators are maximizing revenue from single pieces of content across platforms, why brand attribution links can offset creator commissions with 10% referral bonuses, and the emerging licensing opportunities for creator content in Amazon ads
• Brand Strategy for Amazon Influencer - Why you need brand registry and at least one product video per listing, how to work directly with creators for authentic problem-solving content, and the difference between educational on-site content vs. benefit-driven social content
• The Infrastructure Stabilization Phase - Why the "blue ocean" of easy influencer money is shifting to more strategic "commission stacking" approaches, how platforms are building long-term sustainability, and why brands should focus on creators who post across multiple platforms
• Cross-Platform Creator Strategy - How to identify TikTok creators who also do Amazon Influencer content, why the skill sets are different but complementary, and Liz's advice to double down on what's working rather than trying to be everywhere at once

Chapters: 

(00:00) Re-Introducing Liz Saunders 

(03:30) The Journey of Fluencer Fruit

(07:20) Amazon Influencer Program Insights

(10:09) Shifts in Influencer Marketing

(13:35) Brand Strategies for Influencer Engagement

(19:05) Multi-Channel Selling

(21:31) Building and Selling Fluencer Fruit

(28:03) Insights from the Sales Process

(32:05) Future Endeavors

‍

Liz Saunders:

Everybody is making more money than they've ever thought they could make off of one piece of content in their life, right? They're like, I posted a five second video and retired, and everybody's like, congratulations.

Brett Curry:

Well, hello and welcome to another edition of the E-Commerce Evolution podcast. I'm your host, Brett Curry, CEO of OMG Commerce, and today we have a returning guest. It's going to be an amazing episode. I have Miss Liz Saunders back again with a new title and a lot of new developments that I can't wait to unpack, but she is now the president of the creative division at Wayward. Talk about what that means and why she's doing that. But with that, Liz, welcome to the show and how's it going?

Liz Saunders:

Thanks, Brett. It's going so good. I mean, it's been, I guess a little, almost two years since we chatted, so this is a really fun opportunity to reconnect.

Brett Curry:

It's so crazy when I first thought, man, I should have Liz back on. I thought, well, it's been just a few months. And then I looked and yeah, it's been almost two years, which that's just the way life and e-comm goes, man. It just goes by so stinking fast.

Liz Saunders:

It feels like yesterday and seven years ago simultaneously,

Brett Curry:

Right? 100%. That is 100% true. Yeah. Yeah. So you've had a really big year, Liz. We were both at Solar Summit in Fort Lauderdale. You were the closing keynote of that event, which is a major honor, so kudos to you for that. You sold your company Fluencer Fruit, you sold to Wayward, which is where you are now, so I can't wait to unpack that. And now you get to be on this show twice in a couple of years, so it is a big, big year for you, so congratulations.

Liz Saunders:

Thank you. Thank you.

Brett Curry:

Yeah. Yeah. Which by the way, what was that, given the closing keynote, was that kind of a bucket list thing? Was it something you wanted to do or something you're really nervous about? Kind of walk us through that

Liz Saunders:

Kind of all of those things, honestly. Well, not Bucket List, that's the one that I'll say, and this was part of my keynote, was when I started with Seller Summit. I mean, it's was my entryway into e-comm, and when I started, I was running registration and was just a new Amazon seller, and my whole life was kind of in flux. And so never did I ever think, oh, I would like to be closing keynote, right?

Brett Curry:

Go from run of the admission table years and years ago to now doing the closing Genome,

Liz Saunders:

Checking Bunch badge. And now it's like, and here you're as the, so I will say it definitely wasn't something that I initially was like, that's what I want to do. And also when we got closer, it was like, that would be really cool. And in talking to Tony, because they had a scheduling change with the original closing keynote, and she was like, you've been traveling. Who do you see? And I kind of was like, I'm going to pitch myself. I was like, I'm a rags Riches seller Summit full circle moment. Heck. And she was like, I like it. So they took it and

Brett Curry:

Amazing.

Liz Saunders:

It was nerve wracking, but it was really fun. If you're ever going to do something that big, being in your, I would call it our home audience, those are my people, is like,

Brett Curry:

Yeah, everybody's rooting for you. Everybody was cheering for you. It was a perfect

Liz Saunders:

Environment, so nerve wracking, but also if you fall on your face, they're still going to love you. So it's a little ambivalence.

Brett Curry:

Takes some pressure off for sure. So yeah, it was great. And your background is Jungle Scout. You're a successful seller. You've been doing Seller Summit now, doing some really cool things. And then a few years ago you had this idea, let's build a platform. You called it Fluencer Fruit, that's the company you just exited, which I want to hear all about the exit because I just know so many people we're kind of in the m and a game we're looking to acquire. I know a lot of people that are looking for exits, and so can't wait to unpack that a little bit. But for those who don't know, what is flu fruit and then how does that fit into the wayward ecosystem?

Liz Saunders:

Absolutely. So Fluencer Fruit is an extension that helps content creators on or in the Amazon Influencer program helps them do product research, and it helps them manage their video library. So that's the fastest way to explain it. It's a Chrome extension that just helps visualize all of the things that you care about for onsite content in an easy to digest fashion.

Brett Curry:

Nice. And so what are you seeing right now, and we'll talk about how this fits in with Wayward, but what are you seeing right now with Amazon Influencer? I know this has been an initiative with Amazon for a while. Amazon's always trying to solve the problem of discovery. How do we get customers to discover new products? They still mostly rely on search. They're looking for things to go beyond that. But what have you been seeing with Amazon Influencer as of late?

Liz Saunders:

Yeah, so it's interesting because I think there's two pieces to that coin, which is where it's like they're trying to solve for discoverability, and they're also trying to solve for authentic feedback. So we have seen a lot of change for written reviews, and I use it in quotes because are they really reviews from customers? Amazon's been fighting that

Brett Curry:

Battle. Is it a real person? Is it someone overseas?

Liz Saunders:

Is

Brett Curry:

It just fake? It's a bot. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Liz Saunders:

It's like a competitor being paid to leave one star reviews. So they've been trying to simultaneously solve both of these things. And so where I see the onsite content being the biggest win for them is its authentic user feedback for a product. And so in a way, it does battle some of those paid for bad good, whatever reviews with really authentic conversations in video. The other thing is from

Brett Curry:

A, so it's not just a discovery thing, it's also like a conversion piece as well, right? Yes. And lending real feedback for a specific product that should help with conversions or

Liz Saunders:

Purchases. So the onsite piece up to this point has been almost 100% on the conversion side. It's like you're paying all these other places to drive traffic to the listing. This is the one thing that they let you do that helps with your conversion rate. But something interesting that they're playing with in way of discoverability is surfacing these videos in search results. So every once in a while, and they're still, I think, testing, we don't see this consistently, but every once in a while you'll be searching and instead of a main Amazon image product picture, you'll see a video that's obviously not a brand videoing. So I do think that they're trying to pull that in.

Brett Curry:

So there's no way at the moment for a brand to influence that. But if you have those videos, perhaps Amazon's going to grab that and display that on a search results page?

Liz Saunders:

Yeah, correct. I call those miscellaneous placements because we don't have any insight into them. Amazon never tells us when they're doing them, but we see them and they'll just plug our content into all of these placements, just I think to test conversion and see how much they help or don't.

Brett Curry:

Got it. We do a lot on the Amazon advertising side, huge fan of the ads ecosystem, love sponsor brand video. You be called video and search. What are you seeing, if anything, from your perspective on brands using some of this influencer content, these influencer videos, and running those ads, sponsor brand ads?

Liz Saunders:

So this is really interesting that you asked about this. I do office hours with my subscribers every Thursday, and we were talking about this morning. So out of curiosity, are you seeing the ability to put money on influencer content through the ads console?

Brett Curry:

Well, I don't run the campaigns myself, so I'd have to ask my team. I've not heard anyone mention that yet. But is that maybe in a beta right now?

Liz Saunders:

So 18 months ago, they sent us a bunch of questions, would you rather this for three months to license your content to a brand or this for six months? And they did this whole whatever. And now in the backend, on the creator side of Creator Connections, we have a licensing tab, but it's blank.

Liz Saunders:

So

Liz Saunders:

Where I think they're going is to allow brands to kind of let run traffic to creator content through the actual Amazon ads platform. So I was wondering if you guys were seeing it in beta yet,

Brett Curry:

And then pay a licensing fee potentially to the creator is the way that might work?

Liz Saunders:

That's what we're guessing,

Brett Curry:

Yeah. So either they would pay a licensing fee or the way it works now is if I'm a creator, an influencer, I post content about, let's call it a coffee product on Amazon. If someone views my video and then purchases, I get some kind of a commission for that. Is that correct?

Liz Saunders:

Correct. Yep.

Brett Curry:

Yeah. And what does that commission look like? Are there ranges? Does it depend on me as an influencer? How does that look?

Liz Saunders:

There are influencers who have their own rate cards, but those are the super producers. So your average creator, it gets between one and 4% for those onsite commissions, and it's tagged by category. So however you as the seller have decision trade. If your nursery bookshelf goes in furniture or in kids, those are two different commissions. For the onsite creator, it's either 4% of furniture or two and a quarter percent for baby stuff.

Brett Curry:

Interesting. I wonder why, any insight into why those commissions are different for different categories for influencers?

Liz Saunders:

I have no idea. I mean, I'm assuming that Amazon has discovered

Brett Curry:

Margin profile for those categories, maybe something like that.

Liz Saunders:

I kind assume that they tag it based on the difficulty to sell and drive traffic. So baby stuff sells all day every day. They don't need to incentivize people

Brett Curry:

To that's

Liz Saunders:

Sell that stuff. Whereas furniture, how many people are selling bookshelves?

Brett Curry:

Right?

Liz Saunders:

That's my guess.

Brett Curry:

Yeah, makes sense. So what have you seen change then? So you started Influencer Fruit, what is it, a little over two years ago? Is that right? And so what have you seen shift, what have you seen improve? What have you seen change in terms of the Amazon influencer program?

Liz Saunders:

Yeah, I think it's in the influencer program as well as just in product focused content in general. Right now we're kind of seeing this moment of what I call infrastructure stabilization. So we've been in Blue Ocean, everybody is making more money than they've ever thought they could make off of one piece of content in their life, right? They're like, I posted a five second video and retired. And everybody's like, congratulations. So now we're in between TikTok shop affiliate and Amazon Influencer. We're seeing a little bit of, it's not a slowdown, but they're pulling back to create the infrastructure that will build the long term of the programs.

Liz Saunders:

And so we're seeing people having to adapt to how they're making money. So what we're seeing working is, I call it commission stacking, where from the same piece of content, I want to optimize how many ways I can make money off of it. Will the brand pay me for it? Will they send me a product? Do they have additional commissions available through Creator connections or Wayward? What are their sales? Just trying to think through as opposed to just picking a product and creating content for it, thinking through the big picture. Are they on TikTok and Amazon? Can I create cross-platform content for them?

Brett Curry:

Yeah. So what about from the brand side? So if I'm a seller on Amazon, how should I be thinking about Amazon influencers? Should I be going out pursuing recruiting influencers? What should I be doing?

Liz Saunders:

So if you're on the brand side, the first thing you want to do is make sure your brand registered and that you have uploaded at least one product video or brand video to every listing, because that unlocks that upper video carousel placement, which is the number one converting thing, thinking about the fact that video converts better than text, and UGC converts better than brand videos.

Brett Curry:

Totally.

Liz Saunders:

So getting that above the fold close to the buying decision is always positive. The next piece that just opens the real estate, the next piece is actively working with Amazon influencers is really a cool opportunity where TOS compliant and we're FTC compliant and we're not a black box. So it's not like the Vine Review program, which I understand holds a necessary place, but you can't talk to Vine reviewers. You can talk to us. So if you have something, people keep returning this coffee product because they don't understand that you have to clean the filter this many times a week or the coffee tastes bad. It's like, well, as a content creator, I can go in and be like, you guys, number one mistake that I've made with this is I didn't clean the filter and it hits different when I say it than when the brand does

Brett Curry:

It. It does, it does. But then you can also say, Hey, it was

Liz Saunders:

Really

Brett Curry:

Easy to clean, and man, now I get the perfect cup of coffee every

Liz Saunders:

Time, user error type of thing, error. That's on me. You know what I mean?

Brett Curry:

Much more acceptable coming from a user where you're like, oh, it's normal to do this rather than the brand is making me do extra work. Exactly. Totally makes sense. Yeah, and we've leaned into this for some of our brands. It's something that we can help with where we go out and find influencers. And so I know for a particular betting client, it's been really effective for 'em. Good. But yeah. Any other things you've seen change or shift from a brand's perspective, or actually, I may have cut you off. You said open up videos, open up the carousel, brand registered, get brand, open up that carousel. Then what else should brands do?

Liz Saunders:

Well, I think the brands finding a way all watching everybody trying. Everybody's always trying to be more efficient with their spend and how they fixing their margins, whether it's tariffs, whether it's changes in terms of service, whatever the current challenge is around margins. So some of the things that we're seeing brands do in way of new opportunities, creative problem solving around this is working with creators directly. So you have more control over those conversations. And sometimes that means pulling the actual transactions so that they're outside of Amazon, meaning I'm paying you a flat fee for this as opposed to whatever, but then I can use your content or

Liz Saunders:

Working

Liz Saunders:

With a company like Wayward where you can use brand attribution links to get the referral bonus to offset the commissions you're paying to the creators. It's like a win-win win.

Brett Curry:

So explain that a little bit. I know hardcore Amazon sellers know exactly what you're talking about, but for those that are less familiar

Liz Saunders:

For sure,

Brett Curry:

What is that referral bonus?

Liz Saunders:

Absolutely. So the brand attribution link is basically a brand's version of an affiliate link. Amazon wants you to drive traffic when you drive traffic. They've done something where they'll give you a brand referral bonus. They're not cutting you a check, but they're cutting back on the amount you're paying them for the referral fee, and it's usually around 10%. That's not standard or that's not global, but that's approximate. And so what happened in this conversation was brands were like, if we drive traffic, we don't want to pay for you to drive traffic. And Amazon was like, you're right. Here's how we'll solve that. But then it was like this other piece entered the chat and was like, brands would be happy to pay creators almost a hundred percent of their margin for that first sale to get a new customer. And so this allows people wayward will take your brand attribution link, then what the creator is using, you are getting the brand referral bonus, and then you can pay the creator a higher percentage than if they're just going through Amazon affiliates

Brett Curry:

Because why not? That's free money you're getting from Amazon. Why not pay that to a creator? Give them more incentives, fuel your growth there through influencers. So yeah, it makes a ton of sense.

Liz Saunders:

Yeah, I mean, it's such a cool opportunity. It incentivizes. It's a literal, everyone wins, right?

Brett Curry:

Yeah. Yeah. Super cool. Good. Have you seen more and more brands adopting Amazon influencer? Is it still kind of slow to pick up? How has that been going?

Liz Saunders:

It's a lot of education conversations. It's interesting because I think this is not uncommon, but Amazon will launch a program and then it kind of takes on its own side life from what they initially intended it to be, which is great, right? Because it is its own living organism, right?

Brett Curry:

Sure.

Liz Saunders:

Because of that, though, I think, and I don't have anybody at Amazon that's told me this, but I think the way they initially designed this program was to be a much tighter sister to the affiliate program. So affiliate being the people driving the traffic, influencer being the people who are helping convert the traffic. And I think they initially thought that this was going to be like a one for one people. Were going to be doing both, but it's become a very, there are people that do both, but it's become a very separate skillset. The difference between if you're on a product listing and me helping you make that buying decision is much different than me on my Instagram being like, these are my favorite wrist wraps when I lift, you should go check out their stuff. It's almost like a different selling motion.

Brett Curry:

Totally, totally. Yeah. You're more demonstrating the product on that product detail page and showing how it works. It's a little more education type of thing. Someone's already in the store, they're already talking to you, where if someone's on TikTok or elsewhere, you got to convince them to go to the store to check it out. Exactly. So yeah, different feel. And so what you're finding when Amazon is finding is that's often a different person. So the person running TikTok influencer content is maybe different than the person who's doing Amazon Influencer or it's maybe the same person, they're just creating different content for different places.

Liz Saunders:

Yeah, it's a combination of those two things. But yeah, it is. It's like if I'm on TikTok, I'm trying to get you moving and to click on a link. If I'm on an Amazon influencer or if I'm on an Amazon product listing, I'm like, check out how I can push up this shade tent. It just clicks right into place on my TikTok. People don't care about that. But on the product listing, if you're five four and you don't know how you're going to set up this tent by yourself, you want to see how I can do it. And so it has more educational, more faq, more like feature based, then

Brett Curry:

It's more feature rich where the content to get someone to go to the store that's got to be more benefit oriented, more action oriented. You're moving someone, and then on the page there's kind of overcoming objections, answering questions, talking about features, helping them decide between this product, your product, versus a competitive product. So yeah, makes a ton of sense. How then are you seeing this pair? And we've sort of just talked about it, but TikTok shops obviously it's huge. We have some clients that have exploded with TikTok shops. It's also not for everybody. Amazon's got their own affiliate program. I'm really excited about YouTube's affiliate program. It's basically their answer to TikTok shops. We're doing some early testing here.

Liz Saunders:

It's

Brett Curry:

Been very favorable, but it's early days. So how do you see these things working together and how would you advise brands to consider how they work together?

Liz Saunders:

It's a good question. So I think one of the current struggles that everybody in this product focused content seller space is struggling with is the interpreted need to be everything to all people and to be on every single platform. And while I think there is a space for yes, be on TikTok, be on Amazon, sell 'em, Walmart, all those things, I do think there's a little bit of, depending on how big your team is, how early you are in your company phase, you can't personally probably simultaneously run all of those sales channels. So I think making peace with, if you took off on TikTok, double down, right?

Liz Saunders:

Yeah. If

Liz Saunders:

You took off on Amazon, double down

Liz Saunders:

In

Liz Saunders:

Time, you can add all of those from a content piece though, if you're a brand who is selling on all of those, when you're vetting creators, check and see where they're posting specifically if you're on TikTok and Amazon and you find a creator on TikTok, because that's the more likely direction this goes.

Liz Saunders:

Ask

Liz Saunders:

Them if they're Amazon influencer and if they would post an influencer video in addition to what they're doing on TikTok, because it's much harder. You can reach out to influencers from Amazon through their storefront to their socials and to their, but if you're interacting with them on TikTok, you've already got a little bit of conversation going, that's where I would the best direction.

Brett Curry:

Yeah, totally makes sense. So start that conversation with someone on TikTok and do an influencers working with you there. See if they'll create some content on Amazon as well. And that kind of goes back to the earlier discussion where same person, different flavors of content

Liz Saunders:

Based

Brett Curry:

On where someone is in the buying journey. And it makes just a ton of sense.

Liz Saunders:

Yeah,

Brett Curry:

So very, very cool. Well, awesome. Well, let's kind of go back to what we alluded to at the beginning of the show. So you built Fluencer Fruit, amazing site, amazing product. Kudos to you. It really, really great.

Liz Saunders:

Thank you.

Brett Curry:

Why did you decide to sell, and actually when did you decide to sell? So did you build it in order to sell it or did you build it just for fun and you're like, wait a minute, there's something here. This is valuable. I'm going to sell it.

Liz Saunders:

So I built it to sell it. I went into it knowing that I wouldn't run it forever. I know that my skillset falls between zero and two, right of the stage of the company. I do really well with ambiguity, chaos, and pulling it all into one place with enough of a structure to start handing things off to specialists. So over time, I've realized that that is my skillset. So I knew that I was probably not going to be the person that took it past stage two or whatever that turns out to be. And I read Exit Preneur by our mutual friend, Joe Val, as I was

Brett Curry:

Joe Val, shout out to Joe. Great book. Great book.

Liz Saunders:

I mean, if you are even thinking about Ever in the Future, I just devoured that book and I had legitimately been waiting to read it until I knew I was getting ready. I wanted it to be so fresh. I should have read it twice, but

Brett Curry:

Yeah. Yeah. Well, one thing I've noticed there is, so we started going through this journey and like I said, we're looking at acquiring, we're trying, we're an agency right now trying to get it across the finish line and looking at another deal as well. But one thing I noticed is once we started thinking about m and a, and we'd even explored do we want to sell to an investor? What do we want to do? If you go through the process, if you read Joe's book and there are some other great books, buy, then Build, buy Walker, and there's several others just going through the process, you'll run your business better. Because if you start to look at your business like an investor or a buyer looks at your business, you are just going to run it better. And then you may decide, wow, I'm more profitable running it this way. I'm just going to keep the business. So anyway, I think even if you think you're not going to sell for a while, read those books and run your business, you're going sell it, it be a better business.

Liz Saunders:

I think the best thing that I took out of the book was my books. I'm not a bookkeeper anyways. And so as I set up the LLCs hired a bookkeeper because I just wanted, because when I was at Jungle Scout Chief of Staff, I did a lot of coordinating around m and a conversations and when we acquired Downstream and those sorts of things. And so I've seen the process of when people's books aren't clean and what that looks like. And I was like, so my number one thing was to make sure that my books were always whatever. Anybody could come in if they didn't like the books, that was one thing. Yeah,

Brett Curry:

Compliance super clean. Correct. Someone looks at it, they trust it. Yeah. End of story.

Liz Saunders:

Exactly. So that was my favorite thing, but I knew all along, so I read the book and then I was building, I did think that I was going to run the company for three to five years.

Liz Saunders:

I

Liz Saunders:

Figured it would take me about that long to be interesting. The risks that I took that I knew were risks was my brand was and is still very attached to me as a person. And so when people talk about flu fruit, they talk about you should buy flu fruit so that you get with it Liz's office hours or

Liz Saunders:

Those sorts of things.

Liz Saunders:

So I did know that that was a little bit, but I also assumed because I very specifically picked a pretty niche community that I was going to be a strategic acquisition for somebody filling a gap that nobody else has that fits a bigger picture, whether it was an ads play or those,

Brett Curry:

You likely weren't going to be a platform you were going to be more bolted on or tucked into a platform most likely.

Liz Saunders:

Yeah, my I was like, nobody else is doing anything in this space. I can fill that hole for whoever thinks that it's the most valuable to them at the time.

Brett Curry:

Yeah, that makes a ton of sense. And really building a brand that is a little bit dependent on your personality. I mean, that's what done here at OMGA, public facing, I'm speaking, I'm doing all kinds of things. And so certainly my brand and OMG, they're intertwined, which is fine. I think part of that though is you got to lean into your strengths, right? Absolutely. You're good at building community. People know you, they trust you, they like you, so don't shy away from that just so that a future exit is

Liz Saunders:

Agree

Brett Curry:

Easier, whatever, lean into it a strength, you're going to build a business faster, it's going to be more profitable, and that's going to make the business more valuable. Absolutely. And they kept you on as well, which I'm sure was part of that was related to your personal brand being attacked.

Liz Saunders:

So I was planning on being around a lot longer solo, and then we've talked a lot about building your network and being open to conversations is really critical in whatever realm you operate in. And the wayward thing came out of a LinkedIn conversation.

Brett Curry:

No way.

Liz Saunders:

So

Brett Curry:

Like a post you made on LinkedIn, someone commented on it, or just a connection?

Liz Saunders:

I made a comment on another post, and the head of growth from Wayward reached out to me and was like, I'd love to get on a call and just kind of chat. And so I take a lot of those just because interesting in our space

Brett Curry:

And learn something.

Liz Saunders:

And then he was like, Hey, you should meet our CEO. So I met Allie and then she and I had lunch, and then I did some consulting for them. And as we worked together, it was like, oh, this is actually a really good fit. We have a whole offering together.

Brett Curry:

By the way, what a brilliant strategy from wayward part, I'm assuming this was part of the strategy. Hey, here's Liz. Cool product, cool tech, let's hire her as a consultant and let's see what it's like to work with her. That's actually something we've done several times as we looked at acquisitions is, Hey, let's run some projects together. So we're looking, we're talking m and a, we're talking about joining forces, whatever. Let's run projects together. Let's just see how this goes. I mean, that's the best due diligence you could ever do, or the best addition to due diligence you could ever do. So cool. So what was it like going through the sales process? Any tips, suggestions for someone who's considering it, about to get into the sales process, the selling of their business, that process? What was it like? What tips do you have?

Liz Saunders:

So I think probably the two best decisions I made were I had a broker. So even though I had kind of sourced or whatever, I was working with Wayward, I worked with a broker to help me put together my valuation, my kit, just some of those things. So even though technically the sale happened outside of the broker situation, there were so many things that putting together specifically around the valuation that was really valuable to have his input around what's currently going, what the multiples are. And then the next best thing I did was an attorney. Because initially I was like

Brett Curry:

Got to

Liz Saunders:

Got, I was like, I can do this with chat GPT, and then I was like, will I regret that if I do it wrong? I was like, yes, I will. So you

Brett Curry:

Will. I mean, I love chat GPT or Claude or other tools for legal

Liz Saunders:

Help

Brett Curry:

Structuring advice in the early days. It can help guide you, and those tools can really show you some things, but man, if you're doing a big deal, this may be one of the biggest transactions of your life. If you're looking to acquire or sell or whatever, hire a good m and a attorney. It's so worth

Liz Saunders:

It. Yep, exactly. So those are the things I wouldn't do differently, you know what I mean? Those are the decisions that I'm really glad I made those two decisions

Brett Curry:

For sure, for sure. Anything you would've done differently?

Liz Saunders:

It's a good question. I've been trying to think about that. And honestly, at the moment, I don't have anything. I think probably because I'm a big believer in if you feel like you're trying to kick the door down that maybe that's not the direction. And it just felt like every door in this situation just kind of opened, and so I just kind of walked down the path, right? The CEO, Allie and I have a very open relationship, and so if I had a concern, I would just go to her and there was nothing major. But anytime you have these types of big detailed conversations,

Liz Saunders:

Making

Liz Saunders:

Sure that you're clear on things is super important, obviously. And so I don't currently have anything where I'm like, I wish I had done that part differently.

Brett Curry:

It's so great. Well, and one thing, and because of the way this unfolded, got to know them by meeting in person and then working as a consultant with them, you really got a feel for their character and the way they operate. And because even though this isn't a forever thing, it's kind of getting married, especially if you merge companies, that's like a marriage. So you got to really make sure, is this someone I want to be married to for the next X number of years?

Liz Saunders:

Yeah, exactly.

Brett Curry:

Yeah. And that's where I love being tenacious and if I get a no, I'm going to figure out a way to get a yes and things like that, but you don't want to have to, Hey, this is going to be a partnership. I don't want to have to fight for everything. It should feel somewhat seamless or effortless, at least in parts of it, like the communication and the openness and the, Hey, are we collaborative? And stuff like that. Yeah, it sounds like you definitely took the right path there and it paid off. It paid off.

Liz Saunders:

I'm really pleased with the outcome. I love being on the team, and that was part of the reason that when we started having those conversations, I had been solo for two years, which pretty extroverted. So being able to join a team that's moving in the right direction has been like, oh, good. I have people again,

Brett Curry:

Dude, I thrive in a team environment. I can do okay on my own. I don't mind to sit and write or crunch numbers for a little bit. But doing that for a long period of time, no, that's not where I want to be. That's amazing. So now kind of foreseeable future, you're going to be helping build this out, or is this a short-term thing? Are you allowed to say what does the future hold for Liz and for flu fruit?

Liz Saunders:

Yeah. Well, I have this really cool opportunity with Wayward to build their creator division. That's awesome. So I get to visualize, strategize, scope and help execute on this in a way, to your earlier point, know your strengths. I get to build a community that's rooted in education and tools and straight knowledge sharing around a lot of this. So I'm really excited about that. So I don't know how long that takes or where that takes me, but for right now, we're natural builders that appeals to me is I get to go build something cool with additional resources and helping the community that I'm bringing along

Brett Curry:

With a team with capital, with a structure. But you get a little bit of the best of both worlds. You can still be entrepreneurial and build, but with some resources at your disposal. So that is awesome. Well, Liz, kudos to you, man. Great job. This was your goal at the outset. Let me build something that is valuable enough that someone wants to buy it. You did it yet a successful exit.

Liz Saunders:

Thank

Brett Curry:

Now you guys are building together, which is super great. So if people are listening to this and they're like, man, I want to know more about wayward or about flu fruit. I want to tap into Amazon, the Amazon influencer ecosystem, either as an influencer, I probably just got brands listening, but I could have some people who want to do an influencer, but how can people find more?

Liz Saunders:

Yeah, absolutely. So wayward.com is like if you just want a general whatever, I also do calls with brands. So if you're like, you know what? I just have questions, I'm Liz at, at wayward.com, just shoot me an email. We'll set up a time. I'll walk you through. I'll do an audit of your listings and tell you organically what you can be doing to attract those influencers and or how we can help you push more traffic, kind of figuring, solving for the problem you're having.

Brett Curry:

Yeah, yeah, it's amazing. And then it's Fluencer fruit.com as well, is that's the

Liz Saunders:

Yep. If you're looking for the extension, it's Fluencer fruit.com.

Brett Curry:

Amazing. And then Liz, what about on the socials? Are you active? Are you active on LinkedIn, or was just the onetime comment that changed your life?

Liz Saunders:

Yeah, yeah. I know, right? It's like random comment. I'm, I'm active on LinkedIn, so I think my profile is like Liz Saunders, but if you look up Liz Saunders, you should find me.

Brett Curry:

Awesome. I'll link to everything in the show notes as well. So check out what Liz is up to. Liz, thank you so much. It's been a ton of fun, super valuable. And man, I'm excited to watch you guys build and make the Amazon influencer space even better.

Liz Saunders:

Absolutely. Thanks for having me.

Brett Curry:

Awesome. And as always, thank you for tuning in. We'd love to hear from you. What would you like to hear more of on the show? And if you've not done so, we'd love that review on iTunes, helps other people discover the show. And with that, until next time, thank you for listening.

‍

Think SEO is dead in the age of AI? Think again. While ChatGPT referral traffic surged 112% month-over-month across e-commerce sites, Google still commands 99% of search market share and processes 13.6 billion queries daily. Jeff Oxford, SEO expert and founder of 180 Marketing, reveals why smart brands are doubling down on search optimization—and how the strategies that work for Google are also positioning companies to dominate in AI search results. From his data analysis of 152 SEO campaigns showing consistent 75% traffic growth, to the "ranking factor leak" that exposed Google's true algorithm priorities, Jeff breaks down the exact 4-bucket framework that's still generating millions in revenue for e-commerce brands.

Key Topics & Lessons:

• The State of Search in 2025 - Why Google's 13.6 billion daily queries represent a 64% increase from 2024, how ChatGPT traffic grew 112% month-over-month (but still represents only 1-3% of total traffic), and why the "Google is dead" narrative is premature despite real AI disruption
• The 4-Bucket SEO Framework - Jeff's systematic approach covering Technical SEO (mostly handled by Shopify), Page Optimization (title tags, meta descriptions, headers), Content Strategy (200-300 words on category pages), and Link Building (the 0.3 correlation factor that still dominates rankings)
• What Really Moves the Needle - Data from 152 campaigns showing 20% growth at 3 months, 50% at 6 months, and 75% at 12 months, plus insights from Google's leaked ranking documents revealing click-through rate as a massive ranking factor
• The Great Blog Apocalypse of 2023 - Why standalone content sites lost 90% of their traffic while e-commerce stores with blogs thrived, how Google's "helpful content" update rewarded real businesses over affiliate spam, and Jeff's theory about Google My Business as a ranking signal
• AI SEO Optimization Strategy - How to reverse-engineer ChatGPT sources to identify link targets, why product roundups have a 0.45 correlation with AI citations (higher than traditional backlinks), and the overlap between traditional SEO and AI optimization
• The Future of Automated SEO - Jeff's experiment building a fully autonomous AI agency with zero human account managers, AI tools that can screenshot pages and generate optimized title tags, and how Gemini 2.5 Pro is changing the automation game

Chapters: 

(00:00) The Relevance of SEO in the Age of AI

(12:38) The 4 Components of SEO

(16:19) What Is the Payoff for SEO?

(20:22) Breaking Down Technical SEO

(23:43) On-Page SEO and Meta Descriptions

(25:58) Content Optimization Strategies

(33:27) Link Building

(38:30) AI and SEO: The Future of Search

‍

Jeff Oxford:

The tricky part is deciphering a good backlink from a bad one. So let's say you have two blogs. Trying to determine which blog is going to be helpful and which is going to be harmful is extremely difficult.

Brett Curry:

Well, hello and welcome to another edition of the E-Commerce Evolution podcast. I'm your host, Brett Curry, CEO of OMG Commerce. And today we've got Jeff Oxford on the show, and we're talking about SEO search engine optimization. Going to weave in some ai, some AI optimization, but you may be thinking what, is anybody still searching? Is anybody still talking about SEO these days? Isn't everything ai? And have we got some insights for you? Because the good news is if you're doing good SEO, it's going to help with AI as well, and I can stay with authority. SEO is not dead. And so with that, Jeff, welcome to the show, man. And how's it going? It's going great, Brett. Thanks for having me. Yeah, dude, it was awesome. Connecting at Steve Chu and Tony Airbox, event Seller Summit Fort Lauderdale, one of my favorite events. And I think you've spoken there multiple times as well, correct? You're kind of a

Jeff Oxford:

Radio. Yeah, this is my third time speaking there.

Brett Curry:

Nice, nice. And you talked about SEO. I sat in on your talk. I loved it. What a lot of people don't know is that actually at the very beginning, so OMG is now 15 years old. The first service we offered Jeff, SEO, really SEO for local companies. It was just something we knew, something we liked. I was a search engine nerd, and so a business partner loved it as well. And so that's what we did. Yep. Search engine optimization. That led to Google search, led to Google Shopping. I had a video background that led to YouTube, but in the beginning, SEO baby.

Jeff Oxford:

Okay, so we can go deep in the trenches. It sounds like

Brett Curry:

The We can totally nerd out for sure. Now, I have not been in the SEO game in detail recently, but I still keep up. I can still talk shop for sure. But why SEO as a topic now? And was that just something that Steve, the VIN organizer was interested in, or were there a lot of requests for it? Why SEO as a topic?

Jeff Oxford:

So I guess a little behind the scenes of what happened with that is he was also, he was asking me about AI optimization chat, GPT optimization. And this is after we already got SEO O in there, but we're kind of at a possible paradigm shift of how people are searching. If we just look at right now, June, 2025 as a data point, we just freeze this chat. Google is still the 800 pound gorilla. It still has 99 some ridiculous amount of market share. Chad GD maybe has one to 2% maybe of the search. So this snapshot in time SEO is still just kicking butt, making companies millions of dollars. But the trend is what gets people talking about chat. Yes, it's 1%, maybe one to 2% now, but a year or two ago it was 0.1%. And I mean, I can actually drop some stats for you. So being an e-commerce SEO company, we have access to a lot of Google Analytics accounts, and I had my VA a few last week. He went through all of our analytics accounts. He looked at how much referrals our clients, our e-commerce clients got from chat GBT in April versus May to see what's the

Brett Curry:

Fluctuation. Okay, great comparison. Love that.

Jeff Oxford:

112% increase in referral traffic from month to month. Yeah, from month to month. Wow.

Brett Curry:

Yeah. And I can even Now, did he also look at, and not to get too far ahead of you here, but did he also look at what percentage of overall traffic came from chat?

Jeff Oxford:

Jt? Not impressive. We're talking like most clients, it was one to 2%. But there are some e-commerce stores that we're seeing where chat GT is up to like 20%.

Jeff Oxford:

Whoa, that's significant.

Jeff Oxford:

Of course, it depends on your niche. It depends on how much content marketing you've done, how much blogging you've done, how much do you have enough stuff to get cited and chat GPT? But just if we're just looking at the e-commerce world and averages from this dataset, yeah, it was about a little over a hundred percent month over month. And then average across, this was about just shy of 300 visits a month from chat GBT.

Brett Curry:

Interesting. And how does that compare to Google, Google Organic and

Jeff Oxford:

Google paid, or did you do that comparison? Luckily, I have those stats here. I mean, Google's, I don't have the month over month for Google, but because it's probably pretty steady, I would assume similar data point would be for 2024, we took a sample of, I went over this to my talk, but we took a sample, like 80 e-commerce sites that we have Google Analytics access to, and also have Google search console access to. And across these, you want to see what's the highest performing channel on Google Analytics. And number one outside of direct, which just means it's not attributed, but number one was non-brand organic search, followed by paid search, followed by organic shopping. So yeah, it's one of those things where, yes, if we freeze this point in time, SEO is still the number one top performing channel, even non-branded SEO or non-branded search traffic. But the tides are shifting a bit. I was just on a call with a client earlier today who sells refurbished computers, and we were looking at some of their AI referral stats, and they've already, this year have had 23 in from chat GBT. So everyone should be paying attention to the trend

Jeff Oxford:

I live in here in Bend, Oregon, where we have the last blockbuster. And if you're, you still have a blockbuster, we have the last blockbuster on earth.

Brett Curry:

We were just talking about that. So my oldest kids are 23 and 20, and so they still remember when they were little, we still would go to the video store. There weren't a ton of 'em. It wasn't super popular, saw red box and stuff like that. But there was something magical about walking the aisles of a blockbuster. Maybe they didn't have what you were looking for, but that was all part of the fun. So we were reminiscing and missing the video store days.

Jeff Oxford:

Yeah, come to Bend, you can get a T-shirt and take a look, see what they have.

Brett Curry:

So okay, there's quick dive diversion here, but how's business at the last Blockbuster? Do people come from nostalgia to buy? Gees, a tourist

Jeff Oxford:

Attraction now? It's kind what? It's, yeah, it's all about the nostalgia. You can get some merchandise and they still have the big blockbuster sign outside front and they put little marquee letters on it. Super fun.

Brett Curry:

So I guess the question is, will Google and SEO one day go the way of Blockbuster far off in the future? We don't know, but I think we could say, Jeff, the demise of Google right now is potentially

Jeff Oxford:

Overhyped. What? Say you about that. I mean, no matter how this plays out, Google's going to be fine. Google has a corporation, they've got the infrastructure, they have all the best AI researchers in the world. Their new Gemini 2.5 Pro model is just killer.

Brett Curry:

It's insane. They've been play with a lot.

Jeff Oxford:

Yeah, they've really caught up to the AI race quickly. So props to them. The big question though is what about search these 10 blue links that we have on page one? Are we still going to be searching that way? And there's a big question mark there. Google's now testing their AI mode where it changes the homepage of Google instead of having a search box, it's now a conversation box more similar to chat GPT right now that's just in testing. So we don't know what's going to come out of that test. Is Google going to be like, oh, wow, the engagement's way higher, people are staying on our site longer, we're going to make this the default, or are they going to be like, ah, people don't trust it yet, there's still some hallucinations. We're still the best experience and they're going to stick to how it's now?

Jeff Oxford:

It's a big question mark, but the one part of it that no one really talks about that's so key is just the processing cost to serve a query. So if you go into Google and you type in, let's just say what are the best gaming laptops? What Google can process that quickly, it pulls from their index, it has temp links. Great. If you're on AI mode's, it'll pull five to seven queries. It will then have to pull in all this processing abilities from the LLM to process the results and then serve it up. So their cost per query is going to go up a lot. Now, Google are the kings of infrastructure and servers and data centers, and so they'll be able to get these costs down over time. But if their cost per query goes way up and their ads, the revenue per query goes down because there's less ads, it starts to not make financial sense for them. So even if the user experience is perfect and way better, I'm sure they're going to be balancing out the financial viability of moving to a more of an AI focused search result.

Brett Curry:

Yeah, it's a really good call out. And we got to remember that It's like 80 90% of Google's revenue is from search ads or query-based ads, and you could argue that a larger percentage of their profits come

Jeff Oxford:

From this. Oh, okay. Profits. Yeah, profits are probably way more than that.

Brett Curry:

Yeah. Yeah, which is super interesting. And so a couple sets that I was looking at, because I was curious about this too, right? An executive at Apple recently said, Hey, for the first time ever, we saw fewer searches, fewer Google searches on Safari was the caveat. Google, however, released some data. They did not comment on Safari specifically, which would lead you to believe that was probably true. But they did say, Hey, we're seeing increased search volume across all platforms, including Apple users. And so what's interesting, I looked at this. If you look at daily search queries on Google, 8.3 billion a day in 2024 and now averaging 13.6 billion a day in 2025. So that is a massive leap. And just from the financials just to say, Hey, Google's going to be able to keep the lights on for a little bit. Earnings are up 12% year over year. They had a beat. So their projections or their guidance they gave to Wall Street, they beat it. So things are good from that regard from standpoint and what Google has said, and I was at Google Marketing Live, what Google has said is that, Hey, the AI mode, that's part of what's driving this increase in searches. But your point is spot on where it's heard different estimates, but it's a multiple higher to in terms of compute costs

Jeff Oxford:

To

Brett Curry:

Generate those AI mode results than it is just a normal query. And so Google's going to have to figure that out. I think they will. I think they'll be able to incorporate ads in a pretty unique and pretty clever way. And so listen, I think there's some existential threats facing Google. There's also the antitrust lawsuit and things like that. And so the future is not super clear, but I do think Google's going to be able to figure it out. And yeah, you mentioned AI scientists in 2015, that's when Google bought Deep Mind, which is one of the leading AI research companies on the planet. Some of those top researchers, top scientists are still at Google. I think they've got the best team. And so yeah, I think they'll be able to figure it out. But it is interesting, right? It is an interesting season right now. And so any other points on that, on Google's demise or what the future is going to hold for them before we get into some tactical stuff?

Jeff Oxford:

Yeah, I think that pretty much covers. I mean at this point it's no longer an infrastructure issue with data centers and servers. It's no longer a software issue with LLMs. They have all that. It's really just a user experience UI issue. How do they take this all and give the right user experience? So we'll see what comes up with AI mode. It'll be interesting. It'll be really

Brett Curry:

Interesting to watch. For sure, for sure. So came in super good. I'm excited about it. Why don't we do this before we talk about SEO and AI optimization? They do go hand in hand. Let's back up a little bit and talk about what are the components of SEO. So I know in the early days we would always talk, Hey, there's technical SEO, and there's onsite SEO, and then there's offsite, SEO. How would you define though SEO now and what are the big components of

Jeff Oxford:

It? I have what I call the four buckets or four components of SEO you already mentioned. Some of 'em, technical, SEO number one can Google crawl. Your website is your insight indexable. This is site maps. This is robots tech structured data, basically making sure Google can crawl all your pages, can index all your pages and you don't have any issues that's going to slow down or hurt your ranking. So that's technical. SEO number two is page optimization. This is making sure of your keyword and the title tags, the meta descriptions, the header tags, also having it in your content, just making sure your pages are properly targeting the right keywords. Number three is going to be content. This is e-commerce. So do your category pages and collection pages. Have a description that describes your products and provides a good user experience. Do your products have good descriptions? Do you have blog posts targeting relevant keywords? So that's number three. And then the last one, which for most people listening to this is probably the most important. I mean, if you're a large brand at very high authority, you probably don't need to focus much on link building, but most people who are doing seven figures to low eight figures, the biggest benefit is probably going to be link building that's getting other websites to mention you and link and have a hyperlink back to your site.

Brett Curry:

And it's so interesting, and I remember several years ago, Google's been trying to downplay backlinks and even say they don't work and stuff, but I think a lot of the people that have been doing SEOA long time like yourself, like me, were like, well, that's kind of what Google was built on. The original innovation that Google had. It was a project called bankrupt just to get super nerdy. And the whole idea was Larry Page and Serge Bren were like, Hey, what if we could look at the entire internet, but based on the links? And then wouldn't that be a vote of confidence if a lot of people are linking to this page or this site, that is what gives it authority or makes it trustworthy. They created page rank anyway, so super interesting. So it's like, yeah, I don't think they're going to get away from that, right? That's still got to be the best signal. Probably Google's just getting better at weeding out spammy paid for junkie links, although that's maybe debatable as well.

Jeff Oxford:

Yeah, and I mean, there's a study done recently as just earlier this year in January, and they looked at, this is coming from hfs. They looked at something crazy. It was like, I think it was a million keywords. So that's a million search results. And they did all this statistical analysis to see what ranking factors correlate or which factors correlate with rankings and the number of backlinks to a page. So if we stick with the whole gaming laptops, I'm a recovering gamer, so if we stick with gaming laptops, and I have my Jeff's laptops.com website and I have my gaming laptops page, the number of links to that collection page is one of the highest correlated ranking factors for those stats Nerds listening, it was about 0.3 out with one being perfectly correlated, but in perspective, most ranking factors in SEO have a correlation of 0.05 or 0.1. So to have 0.3 is substantial. It's very, very high correlation. You're going to have to have, if you don't have back lanes, it's going to be really hard to rank. Well,

Brett Curry:

It's like three to six x more valuable than other ranking factors. So to put that into context, that's great. And maybe, okay, so we've, we've got those four buckets of SEO, let's break those down in a minute. But maybe to back up just a little bit before we do that, what's the payoff here? Why do we do this? If we invest time in this, hopefully we've convinced you that the demise of Google's a little bit down the road at least, so you should invest in it. But if we get this right, what's in it for us? What could the payoff be? What are the results you see? I know it varies from category to category, site to site, but what could we see here if we do this right?

Jeff Oxford:

Yeah, I mean, that's the question everyone should ask before you invest in SEO. And it's going to depend on some, a few things. It'll depend on are people searching or even searching your keywords in Google, or do you have a product that's new to the market that people haven't heard of where maybe you're better off doing Facebook ads or YouTube ads? So firstly, is the search interest there, how competitive is it? If someone said, Hey,

Brett Curry:

I want to just real quick on that, Jeff, I think that's a super important point.

Jeff Oxford:

One

Brett Curry:

Of the ways we like to describe that is does your product and does your category depend more on demand generation where you need to go out there and convince people to start looking for your product? They're not maybe thinking about it, but if they saw it, they'd be interested. Or is it more about demand capture

Jeff Oxford:

Where

Brett Curry:

You are capturing existing demand? And so a couple of examples there. On the demand capture side, we've done quite a bit in the automotive space, in auto parts and things like that, especially on paid search. And that's one of those things where it's like, yeah, if I need brake pads, well, first of all, I'm going to go to a dealership, but if I need brake pads, they're squeaking and there's an event, and so then I just go search and I buy brake pads. But if it's something like, Hey, some new apparel that I've never worn before, or maybe the chiefs just made the Super Bowl and so now there's something popping up in my feed and I want to buy it. That's demand generation. And so understanding where your product, your company sits on that continuum is going to also determine how much is it going to pay off to invest in SEO.

Jeff Oxford:

Yeah, 100%. So we talked a little bit earlier about dissecting a bunch of e-commerce analytics accounts, non-branded organic search's traffic. So that means people going to Google searching for a keyword, but not having your brand name in there. They're not searching OMG commerce, they're searching YouTube ad services, something like that. So that was the highest performing revenue wise. So we know the potentials there, but as far as what can you expect as far as increases go, I have some data there. I looked at 152 SEO campaigns over the past few years to see on average, what was the increase after three months, six months, nine months, and 12 months, three months on average, we saw about a 20% increase. Six months was about 50%, nine months was 65, and a year was 75%. So

Brett Curry:

That's just

Jeff Oxford:

Ballpark. And it

Brett Curry:

Changes increase in non

Jeff Oxford:

Organic brand organic traffic. Correct.

Brett Curry:

Nice.

Jeff Oxford:

Yeah. So if you're a massive brand and you're getting hundreds of thousands of visits a month, that 50 to 75%, it's going to pay for itself a thousand times over. If you're a smaller startup and you're only getting maybe a thousand visits a month, a 50 to 75% increase might not be as substantial. So a lot of this depends on for SEO to be worth it. Obviously, the more traffic you have now, the more organic search revenue you have now the better. Think of it as like a multiplier. If you're starting out, it's going to be at least a year before you really start getting good momentum. But the potentials there. If you do it and you're an industry where people are searching your products, it's not too competitive. And the last caveat I'll give is that your prices aren't too expensive. I mentioned this briefly, but if you have a premium product that costs three x to four x, so people get on Amazon, you're going to have a much higher bounce rate and Google's just not going to rank you as high as your competitors.

Brett Curry:

Right, right. Yeah, totally, totally makes sense. Okay, super helpful. So then let's kind of break down those buckets then. Let's go through each one and kind of talk about some of the tactics or approaches that we should consider two to

Jeff Oxford:

Fill that bucket. Sure. Bucket number one, technical SEO. If you're on Shopify, you probably don't have to spend too much time on this. Shopify is a very SEO friendly platform. I'm sure most people listen to this right now. If I had to guess more half are probably on Shopify. Totally.

Brett Curry:

Yeah,

Jeff Oxford:

Totally. It's a great platform. Very, yeah, you probably don't have to spend too much if you're on Shopify, Magento two, BigCommerce or WooCommerce, any of those four platforms, you're probably pretty solid. If you're on a custom platform, if you're on Volution or you still haven't left Yahoo stores or some of these old legacy platforms, you're probably going to want to spend a lot more effort on technical SEO. But for most people

Brett Curry:

It's you're probably going to want to migrate, honestly,

Jeff Oxford:

More so migrate. But for most people, technical, SEO gets overblown. I honestly think people talk about it too much. People love to talk about it because it's something you can control. You can go in and make updates to your XML side map, and you can make changes to your robots text that your crawl efficiency is super dialed in. You can make sure you have schema on all these pages, which a lot of times Google's not even respecting all the different schemas and structured markups these days. So honestly, yes, there might be. It's still good to have a professional, do an audit and say, okay, fix this and then move on. Don't dwell on the technical SEO stage. It should be a one and done type thing. It should not be a big project. Totally makes sense. Number two, page optimization. Very simple. Make sure whatever keyword you're trying to rank for, you have that in the beginning of your title tag. And if you're not familiar what a title tag is, if you search a keyword in Google, it has that blue or purple link that's the title tag. It's a very important ranking factor. Google puts a fair amount of weight into what keywords you put in there

Brett Curry:

In the search in general. Then in the search results, that title tag is going to become kind of the headline almost for that organic listing. Not always, Google can kind of put whatever they want to put there, but a lot of times the title tag shows up there, but also shows up in the tab of the browser as well. So it's going to have some pretty prominent placements and Google gives it a lot of weight.

Jeff Oxford:

And speaking of title tags, like this is one thing I see a lot I a mistake a lot of people make, and you can have a very brandable name. So I was talking with a client who they sell leather conditioners and leather cleaners. It's a product for, if you have a car and you want to have the leather look in its best, you get this leather conditioner that you can put on the car seats. But they don't call it leather conditioner. They call it rejuvenator oil, and that's the brand name. So the issue with that is people aren't searching rejuvenator oil, they're searching. So their products weren't ranking very well in Google because they're calling it what they want to call it,

Jeff Oxford:

Not

Jeff Oxford:

What the customers are calling it. So finding a balance between brandable names and keywords is always something that you're going to have to keep in mind, but you're going to want to have that whatever keyword you're ranking for, ideally you want to have that in your title tag as close to beginning as possible.

Brett Curry:

Love

Jeff Oxford:

It, love it. And then meta descriptions, that's those two lines of black text that we see in the search results. These aren't really a ranking factor. It doesn't matter if you have your keyword in there a bunch or not at all. The best way I like to describe it is meta descriptions are your ad copy for SEO. So having really well written meta descriptions with your calls to actions, unique selling points, it's going to have a higher click-through rate, which will send more traffic. But if Google sees your listings getting a higher click-through rate, that's also going to have a positive impact on rankings.

Brett Curry:

Yeah,

Jeff Oxford:

I

Brett Curry:

Love that. So it's an indirect ranking factor, isn't it, where it's like, use this text to get more clicks, organic clicks, the more organic clicks you get. Actually Google's going to reward that by ranking you higher. So yeah, it's an indirect but important piece.

Jeff Oxford:

And just to nerd out a little bit more, Google had this massive ranking factor leak last year. We saw thousands of documents, internal documents on what they're looking at when scoring websites. One of the things that's confirmed is they look at the click-through rate and the search results. So if you're in position three, but you have a higher click-through rate than position two because you have either a brand name that people recognize or a really well-written meta description, Google, it's one of the most powerful ranking factors. Google will move you up so fast.

Brett Curry:

Yes.

Jeff Oxford:

So yeah, metas script is going

Brett Curry:

To huge impact. Again, that's a vote of confidence, right? That's Google saying, Hey, people are voting with their clicks and with their attention that they like this result. So we're moving it up.

Jeff Oxford:

Exactly. And then the last piece of page optimization, second to last would be header tags. This is what's actually displayed on your page. This is the big header that users see. Not as important as a title tag, but still there's some ranking benefits there. So make sure you have your keyword and the header tag. That's kind of like the

Brett Curry:

Headline for the page, right? So when you open a page, it's

Jeff Oxford:

Basically the headline that you see exactly. It's the big bold text you see at the top. And then the last piece is content. You want to include your keyword in the content, preferably at least once in the first 100 words or so. You want to include variations throughout it. You want to include related keywords. So having your keyword throughout your content is also a very helpful ranking factor, which is why for category pages and collection pages, you want to have at least 200 to 300 words of content and sprinkle your keyword in there a few times.

Brett Curry:

Love it. Love it. Okay, so we got technical SEO that's probably covered before on a reputable platform. Most listeners are probably on Shopify, so you're mostly good there. Then we got page optimization, which is really those factors, title tag content, header tag. Yeah. So it totally makes sense. So then what's bucket number three

Jeff Oxford:

Content? So with content, where I see the most opportunity is making sure your category pages and your collection pages have that 200 to 300 words of content. It can make such a big difference in ranking. It's so easy to do, especially with ai. There's honestly no excuse not to have some well-written category descriptions on your pages. And then there's also blog posts now I think gets overblown a bit. In the SEO world, everyone feels like they have to create content. You have to keep having fresh content on your website that way Google keeps indexing things. There's all these myths about it. My take on blogging is you should only blog if there's particular topics that have high search volume and decent conversion potential. So sticking with the gaming laptops, I bet you there's a lot of people searching best gaming laptops or maybe they're searching Dell versus Lenovo gaming laptops. Any keyword like that, that's like best gaming laptops or comparison, Harrison, or maybe it's laptops for programming students. Anytime that the keyword has some type of search intent that they're looking to do research and byproduct, those are great blog posts to create That way you're not just getting traffic, but you can get conversions. But writing about what is a laptop, how to clean your laptop, how to install Windows 12, whatever it is, those are not going to convert. Yes, they'll drive traffic rank. Whatcha going to get from that? Exactly.

Brett Curry:

That's all going to be answered in the AI overview anyway, so

Jeff Oxford:

That's a hundred percent. So realistically, most clients I see, I'd say maybe 20 to 30% actually have some good topics where it makes sense to go down that direction of blogging. But for me, honestly, about 70% of e-commerce sites I take a look at. I don't think blogging's a waste of time and that they're not going to get a positive ROI from it.

Brett Curry:

Just put content on the category page, product page, things like that, and leave the blog alone. Yeah. Now another interesting thing, I was talking to Steve at Seller Summit and he was talking about how his blog traffic has died. A lot of blog traffic has died, and that was tied to a recent, somewhat recent Google update. Can you talk about that a little bit? When did blogs, again, maybe die is overdramatic, but when did blogs die or when did they reduce in importance? Because there was definitely a day early in our SEO careers, I'm sure where leaning heavily into blogs, that was a winning

Jeff Oxford:

Strategy. Yeah, we can go deep into this one. I was actually working with Steve on his blog while all this stuff was unfolding. So we had worked together, we Forex his blog traffic, and then it was around 2023 that Google had a barrage of updates, different core algorithm updates. They had the helpful content update, and I'm going to give you a little backstory and a tie it all back into your question. So essentially what happened is Google was pretty good at giving results, but what really dropped the ball and really failed was anything like best gaming laptops, best protein powders, best weight loss supplements, best VPNs, the affiliates. And for those that dunno what affiliate is, it's basically I have a blog. I am going to be an Amazon affiliate. I include links to products on Amazon. If people with those links, I get a commission.

Jeff Oxford:

So there's an incentive for these affiliates to rank as high as they can. They can make a lot of money, and they were making a lot of money, millions upon millions of dollars. So they're just flooding Google with all these really crappy low quality affiliate sites that just regurgitating information on Amazon. It's causing a nightmare for Google. Everyone knew the results. You just can't trust them. It's just you're hearing reviews about products and it's obvious they've never even touched the product in their life. They're just regurgitating Amazon reviews and other information. So Google what their solution to this was. They pretty much just decimated any middle tier, low tier, standalone blog. If you're just a blog, you're screwed. But if you're an e-commerce store with a real business that has a business address and has customers and you happen to have a blog doing great, you're blogs can perform better than ever. If you're a service provider like Brett, you or me, and we have a blog, we're established businesses. We might even be Google My Business, we might have a physical address and we have a blog, that's great. But if I'm just a blog and that's all I do and I don't have a product or a service, those sites got decimated,

Brett Curry:

Which makes sense. And a lot of those were back in the day when you would pay for backlinks and things like that. Not that I ever did that, but you'd get links from sites like that. And so a lot of them just got torched.

Jeff Oxford:

Yeah, it got destroyed. I mean, the results now are way better. But one of the byproducts of that is even really good quality content. Like Steve and his website, my wife quit. Her job is good stuff. He's a true industry expert. He knows his stuff, his content's great. It's a high authority I think of for those SEO nerds, domain rating 70 or domain rating domain authority around 70, huge, huge. But even then his traffic dropped off like 90% because these updates. Now I am working with one content site that's pretty authoritative, and we're doing an experiment right now. So I have a theory because when I work with Steve and I did analysis, all his competitors that are just standalone content sites, they plummeted. They dropped off like 90%. The sites that absorbed all those rankings and benefited were the product and service sites that had, they were in Google My Business, they were in Google's knowledge graph. So if you do auto complete, they'll show up as like a known entity and Google. And so right now I'm doing an experiment to see if I can take a blog, get them and Google my business, get them a Wikipedia page, get them all the signals that show it's a legit business.

Brett Curry:

This a real business,

Jeff Oxford:

A real business. What impact will that have? So TBD, but the correlation is there.

Brett Curry:

I love that theory, man. That's smart. Yeah, keep me posted on that. That's super interesting.

Jeff Oxford:

Yeah, so to be determined, but the correlation is still there. The sites that have a physical address, a phone number, they're in Google my business, they're in the knowledge panel. Those sites were fine. The ones that didn't have a knowledge panel or any of that, they all just got decimated.

Brett Curry:

Got it, got it. Interesting. Okay, super interesting insight there. Thanks for sharing that. What else about this content bucket? What else would you advise or coach us on for our e-commerce store?

Jeff Oxford:

That's pretty much it. I have 200, 300 on category pages. Include your keyword and then just one little pro tip. If you're wondering what related keywords to include in your content, just search your keyword and Google image search and you'll have that refinement bar at the top. Those are all great related keywords that you might want to consider ones that are applicable, including your content.

Brett Curry:

Interesting. Great, great insight there. Cool. So we've got our technical on page, our content.

Jeff Oxford:

What's bucket number four? Bucket number four is link building. You want to get as many other sites linking back to you as possible. Now, if you want to do this, the white hat way, one strategy that can work really well for e-commerce sites is product reviews. If you have a direct to consumer product, you can find some blogs, you send them some product for free, they take some photos, they write about it, and in the writeup, they're going to include a link back. So that's probably one of the best ways to do it. And you can also get some referral traffic from these sites if it has a big enough following. Another strategy that can work well but is extremely difficult is content marketing, creating content, promoting content. And the reason it's so hard is when you're doing content marketing for link building, it's less about what topics will appeal to your customers and what topics will appeal to bloggers.

Jeff Oxford:

So you're probably going to create content that might not even interest your, it could be if we're sticking with gaming laptops, I could do an article about gaming statistics, like what percent of Americans youth spend 10 hours a day or more on video games, which video games are the most popular by hours? I do a whole breakdown on all these statistics that's not really going to interest someone looking to buy a gaming laptop, but it could interest a journalist who's writing about screen time on kids and wants to reference a statistic. Now that's going to get some backlink. So it's why it's so hard to do it is you have to really kind of change your thinking and less of what will my customers want versus what will the journalists and the bloggers want to link to.

Brett Curry:

Super interesting. Yeah. So what are the most used tactics then, and what are you coaching your clients on in terms of practical ways to build links? Because this has always been one of those areas where it's the highest correlation in terms of ranking factors. It's how Google was built based on backlinks, but to do it the right way is really time intensive and really difficult. So what are some of the tips, suggestions, advice that you give to clients?

Jeff Oxford:

So I'd say try go the white hat as much as you can. Definitely do the content marketing or the product reviews. But here's the sad truth about it. If you want to get a link to a product page, if you want to get link to a category page, nine times of the 10, a blogger is going to require payment. You could have the most compelling pitch with the best product. That's truly groundbreaking. But these bloggers, this is how they put food on their table. They live off this. This is their income. And if they check your site, if you were a library or you were a nonprofit, they're probably not going to charge you. If you reach out to them and they click on your site, it's like, oh, this is an e-commerce site. Nine times out of 10, they're going to require payment.

Jeff Oxford:

So they might call it an editorial fee of like, oh, we'll write about you, we'll feature you, but it's going to take time to pull up that post and make the edits and then publish it and do all this stuff. So you can expect anywhere from 50, I'd say, to a hundred dollars of these editorial fees or blog fees to get featured. So that's the sad truth of it. What's even kind of more sad is I wish it didn't work as well. I really wish that the links paid links from blogs didn't work, but they do. And the correlations there, insights rank. Well, the tricky part is deciphering a good backlink from a bad one. So let say have two blogs, trying to determine which blog is going to be helpful and which is going to be harmful is extremely difficult. I see even SEO veterans have been doing this for five to 10 years. They still get it wrong. You have to look at, well, what's the domain rating and domain authority of the site? Is this going to help me? Okay, let's go a step deeper. How much traffic does this have? Does it actually have some rankings in Google?

Jeff Oxford:

But now they're getting smart, and I don't know if you know this Brett, but a lot of sites will manipulate and game their traffic numbers by artificially running a bunch of fake searches on nonsense nonsense keywords and that they ranked for. So now they're inflating that. So you have to go a step deeper and see the keywords that are driving traffic are those keywords related to the site's main focus. So there's so many checks you have to do. We'll even go deep and look at who is this linking out to? Is it linking out to porn sites and escort sites and Viagra sites? So for most people, they stop at level one and level two, they'll look at the domain rating, the traffic, they'll move on, but you'll end up buying links that are just absolute garbage and can hurt your sites. So link billing, it's so hard for that reason. So that's why I say if you're going to do it, the white hat approach, going to real blogs and product reviews and take a stab at content marketing is probably best. But just know of all the four buckets, link billing is the most difficult and the hardest for an e-commerce brand to make a core competency.

Brett Curry:

Yeah, it totally makes sense, man. Super, super helpful. So let's then get to maybe the question that was most burning in people's minds. Well then what about ai, SEO? So what do we do? So, okay, this is our core SEO, and that's aimed at Google, but what if we want to rank in Jet GPT or Perplexity or Gemini, which is related to Google or other AI that's yet to come? What's your advice on that?

Jeff Oxford:

It's a great question. There is some overlap. If you're doing SEO, right, a lot of it's going to carry over to chat GPT. So one thing that chat GT does is a lot of times they'll show the sources of where it's pulling information from and it's pulling from the web. So content marketing and blocking can be great if you have some posts and anyone to this, if you want to show up better in chat g bt, first thing you should do is do a best gaming laptops, best protein powder, whatever your product is, create a buyer's guide or a product roundup about it. So those get picked up very frequently in chat GBT, so you get a little more influence on swaying the model, whatever you think is best. So blogging, content marketing is one. Link building is another one. We see if there's getting mentioned on other websites, getting your product reviews on authoritative sites, those are also getting picked up as sources. So that can help. It's like a PR play where the more sites and webpages in the web that mention your products,

Jeff Oxford:

The higher chance you have of being cited in these large language models. But if you want to be just kind of go straight to the jugular on how you're going to rank, well search your keyword or go into a chat, GPT type best protein powder, whatever your keyword is in there, scroll down, look at the sources, it's going to tell you exactly where it's pulling from to generic this result and try to get your product featured in those. So it's going to show you all these top 10 protein powder, top eight protein powder type pages. You're going to want to reach out to them. You're probably going to have to send them free product. You'll probably have to send them an affiliate link to make it worth it. You'll probably have to have a compelling pitch on why they should include you. But that what I'm seeing is the biggest impact. We did some correlation research on this, and it was like we talked about links being highly correlated with 0.3 when it came to chat GPT and getting your product included, it was like 0.45 correlation of the number of different product roundups you were cited in. So the more product roundups your product is found in, that's in the sources, the much higher chance you're going to have of showing up in those chat GBT shopping carousels.

Brett Curry:

Yeah, it totally makes sense. And in some ways it's similar to product reviews. And what I mean by that is looking at Amazon reviews, product reviews make a big difference in terms of ranking and conversions and all those things. And the issue is that they can be gamed, right? People can manipulate them. There's tons of fake reviews. So it's like, well then won't Amazon just get away from that? And the real answer is no, they can't. There's no better signal. Every user or every shopper wants to see reviews. And so it's got to get better at weeding out the crappy reviews. And I think it's the same thing with these roundup blogs, with backlinks, with things like that. These are signals that when done right are the clearest, most powerful signals that are out there right now. And so really just got to do it the right way, build those things the right way. But it makes sense to me that those are going to continue to be a ranking factor for SEO and for AI SEO.

Jeff Oxford:

Yeah, I would a hundred percent agree with that. Cool. Cool.

Brett Curry:

Awesome, man. Well, this has been fantastic. I really want to pick your brain on AI as well. So how about, let's do this. Let's be like a little teaser. We'll do another ai, let's do an AI focused episode. This will be the little teaser for it. What models are you playing with the most right now? What are you most excited about with ai and specifically like AI and working with your agency and automation and stuff like that? And is there one cool thing you can share with the audience related to ai?

Jeff Oxford:

Yeah, so models wise, I was using Claude 3.7 a bunch, and then four for a while, but then I started using Gemini 2.5 pro, and I think that's my favorite one right now. What I love doing for fun, I'm not a coder, I've always wanted to be a programmer, but I dunno how to program. So I've been using this tool Rept, which is like an AI code generator, and I've been able to build some pretty powerful apps that can take a screenshot of a blog, pass that screenshot to an AI model, analyze it, and then from that analysis also pull on keyword ranking data for page and then generate title tags, meta descriptions and headers. So basically automating the SEO process where you take a screenshot of a page, you pull on the ranking data, you give all this to the AI model and have it optimize the page. So as far as your teaser goes, literally just last week I pulled the trigger and hired three full-time AI automation specialists. And we're doing an experiment to build a fully autonomous AI agency where there'd be no people. It's just I'm going to see how many of the SEO steps can I automate with ai? And instead of having an actual account manager, you have your AI account manager. So this is something that we're building out.

Brett Curry:

Dude, can't wait to see that. Okay. That was a good teaser right there. That was powerful. Definitely going to do an AI episode coming up next. And so looking forward to that. But Jeff, as people are listening to this and they're like, dang, alright, I got to think about seo. I got to think about ai seo. I need to talk to Jeff. How can people reach out to you? How can they work with you?

Jeff Oxford:

Yeah, you can go to my website. It's just 1 8 0 marketing.com, 180 marketing.com. Or you can just shoot me an email directly. My email is Jeff at 1 8 0 marketing.com. Happy to hear from you guys.

Brett Curry:

And Jeff, as you can tell, just super cool dude, the kind of guy you want to hang out with. Grab a beer with talk, SEO and talk e-commerce with. And so with that, Jeff, awesome job, man. Thanks for the time and looking forward to that AI episode. Thanks, Brett. This has been fun. Awesome. And as always, thank you for tuning in. Would love to hear from you, connect with me on LinkedIn or shoot us a note about the pod. Or if you like this episode, share it with somebody that you think will enjoy it. And with that, until next time, thank you for listening.

‍

No one knows more about eCommerce growth than my friend Ezra Firestone. Arguably, no one is a more interesting interview than Ezra either. This episode does NOT disappoint. Ezra bootstrapped growth for Boom from $0 to $40mill + per year. He also recently bought another high-profile eComm brand (more on that in the show).This episode is straight fire. Here’s a look at what we dive into:

• How Ezra is approaching email marketing and email list growth in 2022. I’m guessing you’re missing his email strategy - even if you consider yourself an email marketing pro.
• How BOOM is approaching front-end offers.
• Why you should consider inventing a holiday and how BOOM has done that.
• Growing your SMS list.
• Plus MUCH, much more!

‍

Mentioned in this Episode:

Ezra Firestone

   - LinkedIn

   - Instagram

   - Twitter

   - Facebook

BOOM! by Cindy Joseph‍

oVertone‍

Zipify Pages‍

Smart Marketer‍

Blue Ribbon Mastermind‍

Klaviyo‍

Postscript‍

Attentive‍

Dan Kennedy‍

Jay Abraham‍

Native Deodorant‍

Northbeam‍

John Grimshaw‍

Molly Pittman‍

Train My Traffic Person

‍

Transcript:

Brett Curry:

Welcome to the Spicy Curry Podcast, where we explore hot takes in e-commerce and digital marketing. We feature some of the brightest guests with the spiciest perspectives on what it takes to grow your business online. Season one is built on the old business adage that it really takes three things to succeed. One, have something good to say. Two, say it well. And three, say it often.

Brett Curry:

Today, my guest is none other than the e-commerce legend himself, Ezra Firestone. If you're serious about growing your e-commerce business, then you have to pay attention to Ezra. And arguably, there's not a more interesting interview than Ezra Firestone. He bootstrapped Boom by Cindy Joseph from zero to now, $40 million a year in growth. He now owns and operates Overtone, a $25 million a year e-commerce brand. He also co-founded Zipify Pages, Smart Marketer, and he's the mastermind behind my favorite e-commerce mastermind, Blue Ribbon.

Brett Curry:

This is a wide ranging discussion. We talk about things like cold plunges and samurai swords. But yes of course, we spend most of our time talking about e-commerce growth strategies. We look at Ezra's really unique approach to email marketing, and how much of his ad budget he's dedicating to growing his email list. We also look at SMS marketing. And we look at how to invent a holiday, and what that looks like. And then we're also looking at how Boom is crafting and creating front end offers. You won't want to miss a minute of this show. I hope you enjoy my interview with Ezra Firestone.

Brett Curry:

The Spicy Curry Podcast is brought to you by OMG Commerce, Attentive, OneClickUpsell, Zipify Pages, and Payability. All right, I am absolutely stoked out of my mind for this next guest, and personal friend of mine. We do some work together. I always count it a joy when I get to talk to this guest. And so, to have this uninterrupted time to dive in deep on strategies, it's going to be amazing, and I'm glad you get to listen in. And so if I look at, man, if you need tactics, if you need strategies, if you need help for how to take your e-commerce business to the next level, and if you need to get a little bit spicy, you need Ezra Firestone.

Brett Curry:

And so today I've got the man, the myth, the legend. He's flexing if you're watching the video. Got Ezra Firestone on the call. We're talking about eight top strategies to just blow up your business this year in a good way. We may not get to all eight, we'll see how it goes. But with that intro, Ezra, what's up, man? How you doing? And welcome to the show.

Ezra Firestone:

Brett, the Fury Curry, I'm fresh out of the cold plunge, dog. One minute, 30 seconds, 32 degrees. My whole body is red, I'm shivering, I'm shaking, we're podcasting. Happy to be here man, thanks.

Brett Curry:

It's hilarious. You hopped on the call and I was like, "Oh no, something's wrong with Ezra. He just doesn't look right." It's like, well, you just got out of a 32 degree bathtub. Of course, your body's in shock. But I appreciate taking the time to do this. And man, it's just always, always fun to chat.

Ezra Firestone:

Yeah, man. And just watching your journey, I seen you come up in the game from back in the day, when you had an SEO agency. You know?

Brett Curry:

Yeah.

Ezra Firestone:

From way back. I don't even know if it was 2008, 2009, it was a long time ago. 2010, whatever it was. And then to watch you rise to be one of the most prominent voices in the e-commerce world, and also to have a top 2% advertising agency, maybe you guys are top 1% at this point, I mean, you run all of our stuff. So it's been fun to watch your journey and just happy to be on the podcast.

Brett Curry:

Dude, thanks. It's been so fun to grow. I credit you and your community with a lot of that growth. And your approach to having fun, and doing what's right, and being extremely successful, and that blend, is awesome. Your motto, for those that don't know, is "Serve the world unselfishly and profit." And actually before we get into tactics and strategies for this year, and there's some amazing ones, can you talk a little bit about that for those that are new to the world of Ezra Firestone?

Ezra Firestone:

Yeah, I mean, I think that's a description-

Brett Curry:

... Yeah.

Ezra Firestone:

I think it's a description, not a statement. It's how I have seen things work. That when you are in a role of service, unselfishly with the goal of serving, you do profit by the very nature of serving. And it may not be monetarily. Maybe it's spiritually, mentally, emotionally, physically, energetically. But my goal is to serve. And I find joy in the act of service. I think there's a lot of value, and fun, and enjoyment, and good. And also in business, if you can truly serve a community, you will be profitable. And so I think that's just a description of how it goes. And also it's what I'm looking to do. I'm looking to serve the world unselfishly and also profit. I want to take care of my family. I want to take care of my community. I want to put resource towards causes in the world that I find noble. And I need fucking money to do that. Right?

Brett Curry:

Exactly. Yeah.

Ezra Firestone:

And the way going to get that money is by helping a group of people out with solutions to problems they have.

Brett Curry:

Yeah, I love that. If you look at, what is leadership, what does it mean to lead a company or to be a CEO, it's really serving. Serving your team more than commanding and dictating.

Ezra Firestone:

100%.

Brett Curry:

And how do build a brand, how do you build a business? It's serving a community. It's serving the needs and meeting the needs of buyers. And so, yeah. I love it. So it's really, really just-

Ezra Firestone:

Yeah. And then just because you're serving a group, doesn't mean you can't sell them stuff.

Brett Curry:

Exactly.

Ezra Firestone:

Selling them stuff is also serving them.

Brett Curry:

Because people want to buy stuff, right?

Ezra Firestone:

Yeah.

Brett Curry:

They want to have those needs met. And retail therapy is a thing too. So one of the greatest acts of service you can do, is sell a good product to the right person.

Ezra Firestone:

I'll tell you what dude. You and I both know that this last six months have been the most intense and stressful on the personal side of my life, with some health problems of some family members. And I done fucking discovered stress shopping, bro. I had never done that. I'm not a guy who buys shit that I just don't need or want. I'm willing to buy things. I have a lot of money, and I didn't come from money. I now have more money than basically everyone that I know, and I'm not against purchasing things. But I usually purchase things that I really like. I'll buy a nice espresso machine, or I'll buy a nice skateboard.

Brett Curry:

Which I've had espresso from that espresso machine. And you pull a mean shot of espresso, my friend.

Ezra Firestone:

Yeah. I will spend money happily on things that are enjoyable and that I will use, but I don't just buy frivolously, until now, dude. I bought six pairs of the same Chelsea boot. When I turned around, I was like, "What? I have lost my mind, dude." This is stress shopping.

Brett Curry:

Why did I buy this?

Ezra Firestone:

Yeah.

Brett Curry:

I think one time I was on a call with you and you just recently bought like a samurai sword or something. I don't think it was actually a samurai sword, but it was some kind of sword.

Ezra Firestone:

A katana. Yeah, it was a Japanese katana. I use it to chop wood for my sweat lodge. So that was actually a useful tool. It's good for chopping kindling.

Brett Curry:

Yeah. That's awesome, man. Super fun. So people are buying right now. The economy's pretty hot, and certainly there are some issues too. But people are buying stuff. So let's dive in. You recently wrote a blog post, which I'm going to link to, so you can see this in the show notes, talking about eight top growth strategies. And first of all, for those that don't know the journey, talk about Boom by Cindy Joseph and how it's grown.

Ezra Firestone:

(singing)

Brett Curry:

Because you guys are set to do about 40 million this year, right?

Ezra Firestone:

So I started this brand in 2010. Took me to 2014 to make my first million dollar a year in total revenue. By 2016, I was doing 17 million. This last year, I did 42. This year I think I'll do 47. Top line revenue at about a 25% EBIDA margin, so maybe making six or 7 million a year in profit on that.

Brett Curry:

Which is amazing. Amazing.

Ezra Firestone:

I got about 30 employees at that company. I also own Zipify Apps, about a $10 million a year software company. Also a couple million bucks in profit on that, maybe about 60 employees there. And I just bought a company called Overtone Color, which has about 20 team members. It'll do about 25, 30 million this year. And I got Smart Marketer too. And I'm just a guy. I didn't go to college, I have no special skills, other than that I'm a good communicator and I'm willing to put my foot down and do the work, and ask for help when I need it. And I think my story shows that if... I'm a complete failure in the eyes of the school system. They labeled me a dumb kid, and someone who was not going to be successful. And I think for anybody who doesn't fit into the mold, who maybe is dyslexic, or maybe has some reason why the general society is telling them that they can't be successful, the internet opens up an opportunity for us.

Ezra Firestone:

And there's skills that we can develop. Advertising, direct response marketing, landing page optimization, copywriting, product development, podcasting, social media, that can support us in taking care of our families. And I didn't come from resource, and so I wanted to create that. And I've been able to, and I've been doing it now for 17 years. I got pretty fucking good at it. I made every mistake you could make. I didn't pay my taxes, I did all the stupid you can do. But I did it when I was younger, and earlier in my... And I didn't have podcasts like yours to learn from. I had a bunch of creepy dudes on an internet forum who were shilling fucking gambling and porn. That was when I got into the game.

Brett Curry:

Yeah. Online marketing was a bit of a dark place back in those early days.

Ezra Firestone:

You didn't want to say you were an internet marketer. It wasn't good.

Brett Curry:

No, no, that was not prestigious. No one looked at that highly. For sure.

Ezra Firestone:

So yeah. So I've been doing it a long time now, I'm really good at it. And I've been talking about it since about 2011. I was one of the first people to start blogging about e-commerce. And by the very nature of being one of the first, I became popular. Not that I was anything special than anyone else, but I was the first to do it, and so I got real popular. And I've stayed in that space of documenting my journey. And I got a bunch of people who think it's cool, and follow what I do. And I'm pretty good at it, you know?

Brett Curry:

Yeah.

Ezra Firestone:

And I've been able to successfully train and educate, and bring up in the game, thousands and thousands of internet entrepreneurs over the years. You being one of them who I've impacted.

Brett Curry:

Big time.

Ezra Firestone:

Not that I did anything for you, other than show you what I was doing. So yeah, so I like talking about this stuff.

Brett Curry:

It's been so amazing to watch that progression as well, and getting to see behind the scenes, seeing you operate with your team. So I've been to your house and I've hung out with the inner circle of Smart Marketer and Boom. And of course we were on calls, and our agency serves you and stuff. So I've seen you in a lot of different capacities. And man, you're the same leader behind the scenes as you are on stage. You care about people on stage or one on one. You're extremely smart and strategic, and you get marketing, and you understand human in nature, and you take massive action. All kinds of stuff we can break down. So it's been really fun to observe that and get the front row seat of that as well.

Ezra Firestone:

I can also do a cool poker chip trick. Look at this.

Brett Curry:

Is that right? Oh, look at that.

Ezra Firestone:

Wait.

Brett Curry:

Look at that.

Ezra Firestone:

Hold on. Damn, that was not cool. I dropped it. Hold on.

Brett Curry:

We're going to try this again. So if you're listening, just take my word for it. He's a great poker chip-

Ezra Firestone:

My hands are frozen. My hands are frozen. We should probably get into tactics.

Brett Curry:

Do not attempt a poker chip trick out of a cold plunge.

Ezra Firestone:

People are going to be like, "Enough of this bullshit, dude. You should talk about some tactics." We should talk about some strategies.

Brett Curry:

Exactly. So here we go. So let's dive in. One thing that we've seen you guys operate on, we're running this on YouTube for you, but you're buying more email leads. So talk about that. So this is top strategy number one, buying more email leads. What does that look like, and why?

Ezra Firestone:

Dude, nobody's talking about email. Everybody's like "SMS, video ads." This and that. Well guess what has always been since I've been in the game, about 25 to 40% of my business? Literally since '05, dude. Emails.

Brett Curry:

Email. Email.

Ezra Firestone:

I've been sending motherfucking emails since 2005. And it is to this day, it'll be 36% of Boom's total revenue this year.

Brett Curry:

It's crazy.

Ezra Firestone:

And nobody-

Brett Curry:

Email touches 36% of all purchases through Boom.

Ezra Firestone:

Yeah, it's last click, dude. It's last click for 36% of my purchases.

Brett Curry:

It's awesome.

Ezra Firestone:

So why would I not be putting so much energy in growing that list? Nobody does it. Everybody just runs top of funnel video ads, conversion ads, and they hope that when somebody comes to their website, their onsite popup, or their card abandonment, or their exit intent, are going to capture the email lead for them. Great, do that. But also, you know what I'm doing? Gated content. I'm doing giveaways. I'm doing all kinds of different straight up lead generation campaigns. One of my best ones, is we use these things called pre-sell articles, which are basically articles that are story-based, like, "Five makeup tips for older women." Or "Seven makeup tips for women who wear glasses." Or "How to overcome perfectionism in your fifties." Or whatever kind of content that our community is interested in, that leads back to our products.

Ezra Firestone:

And we use those in our email auto responders, we run ads to them, we mail them to our email list. We use them everywhere. At every stage of the sales process. What we also do, is we gate them. So we put an opt-in front of it, and it says, "Hey, enter email address here to get our five makeup tips for women over 50." We run ads to that with a conversion objective for the lead event, the lead event fires on the thank you page. They enter their email address, guess where they get dropped? On the same pre-sell that I'm running at the top of the funnel.

Ezra Firestone:

But now we have their email lead, and we put them on a automation sequence, to warm them up and try to sell them. And if they don't buy, we put them on our bucket list. I also run giveaways every six weeks. And basically those are my two main top of funnel lead gen strategies, is gated content and giveaways. But I'll do Facebook lives, and I'll do other things as well. But if you just do gated content and giveaways, you should spend about five to 10% of your total marketing budget on email lead generation. Because some people take a little longer to warm up than others. So if you're only running conversion ads, you're going to miss out on growing your audience in a way that could be beneficial for you.

Brett Curry:

Yeah. I love this so much, and it's something that we've observed you doing, and something we're talking about now with other clients. That, if you can grow that email list, and if you're properly running email marketing, you're going to be able to convert that at a really high rate. And so gated content, so information people want, and/or giveaways, great ways to drive that list. And I was looking through some of your notes here. Looks like over the last 12 months you spent about 200,000 buying email leads that have then generated 750,000 in sales. So about a 375% return on add spend. That's not bad. But that's not like-

Ezra Firestone:

And that's with excluding anybody who was already on the list, dude.

Brett Curry:

What's that?

Ezra Firestone:

That's with excluding anyone who was already on the list. So those are new leads.

Brett Curry:

Just strictly new leads. So that really changes the game, because you could be looking at those campaigns and thinking, "Well, I just drove an email sign up. I didn't make a sale there, so it's not really worth a whole lot." But then you've got to look at that whole picture. What did those email subscribers do for you over the next six to 12 months? And in your case, it's a 3.75 X ROAS, which is amazing.

Ezra Firestone:

Pretty sweet. I mean, not that everyone's going to have that result, but it's worth doing, still, nonetheless.

Brett Curry:

Exactly. So, all right, awesome. So strategy number one, buy more email leads. I'm sold on that idea. Idea number two, launch new products. So talk about how Boom is approaching launching new products.

Ezra Firestone:

So to have a successful e-commerce business, you have to get your repeat customer rate up. Ideally over 30% of total revenue comes from repeat customers, people who bought from you once before. The best way to do that is to sell them more of what they already bought, if it's consumable. Or to introduce new items that they might want from you. And by the way, if somebody knows you, likes you, trust you, you're putting out content, you're engaging them, you've delivered a good product, they're going to probably want to buy whatever else you have to offer if it's tangentially related to what they bought in the first place.

Ezra Firestone:

So what we do is we send a customer survey every six months to our two X buyers, and we give them a bunch of stuff, like "If we were going to add more colors, what colors do you want? If you could wave a magic wand, what products would you have us create?" We have a 20 question survey. We say, "Hey, five people who take this survey are going to win $100 gift certificate to the store". We get a couple thousand responses. Based on that, we figure out what products to make next, based on the desire of our community.

Brett Curry:

That creates your product roadmap.

Ezra Firestone:

As an example, 50% of people wanted a mascara, 46% of people wanted a lip gloss, and 53% of people wanted an additional color of Boomstick. We released all three of those products last year, based on that information. They were our three best product launches ever. We just released the Boomstick color last week, we sold 15,000 units in 18 hours. 650 grand in revenue in 18 hours.

Brett Curry:

Whoa. Wait, wait, wait, wait, wait. Say that again. You sold what?

Ezra Firestone:

We sold 15,000 units in 18 hours, dude. We sold out. 650 grand in 18 hours. Now of course I've got a mature company, but the point is that this process gets better over time. So when you're developing a new product, you're doing it in desire to your past customers, in relationship to their desire. And for us, you have componentry, formulation, and secondary packaging. So componentry is like, what is the component that it's going to go in? Well, the Boomstick, we already have that. That's great, we'll reuse the component we already have. The formula is, what is it going to be, why is it going to be that way, what are the benchmarks other brands are doing that we want to meet? We go through a bunch of iterations, we send it out to our best customers to test. It takes us about six months to a year to develop a formula.

Ezra Firestone:

And then our secondary packaging, is what is the box, what's the write alongs, what are the inserts? We get all that together, we run a photo shoot for it. And then we do an early bird. "Hey, we're going to launch this new product. This is what it is. Get excited, sign up for it to hear about it first." And then what happens is, as they're signing up, and as they're posting on social about it on the thread, we're finding out what they want to know. They're asking, "Is it hypoallergenic?" And we're like, "Oh shit, we don't have hypoallergenic on the sales page. It is hypo allergenic." So we add that to the sales page. The questions they ask, they become the FAQs that we put on the... So we use the pre-launch as a way to build out the marketing material. Build out the FAQ, build out the sales page.

Ezra Firestone:

And then we launch it, run ads to it, do emails to it. And then it becomes part of our ongoing marketing. Put it in bundles. And you can do this too with products you already have. So you can reformulate them to make them better than they already are. Based on feedback, you can change the componentry or packaging, make it more sustainable. You can bundle it with other items to make a kit. So you can renew and make better products you already have, and relaunch them, as well as introducing new items. But for us, we are aiming to introduce four new items a year, which is once a quarter, which is hard to do.

Brett Curry:

That's aggressive. That's one a quarter.

Ezra Firestone:

It's hard to do when you're making them all from scratch.

Brett Curry:

It's hard to do, yeah.

Ezra Firestone:

But it's a huge, huge part of the business. So yeah, it's really important to continually making the products better.

Brett Curry:

Yeah. And it's interesting that it's also fairly risky, too, to launch a new product. Will it go well, will it not go well? But the approach you're taking, it really eliminates a lot of the risk. You know that if you deliver a good product, which you guys do, you know how to do that, you're delivering exactly what someone is requesting, and exactly what someone wants.

Ezra Firestone:

Yeah, and they also then can become a new top of funnel sales processes. So we can run top of funnel ads now. So for our mascara, I mean, that's our second best seller of all time, and we can run it at the top of the funnel because everybody's interested in mascara. And we didn't have one before. So we couldn't run ads for it at the top of the funnel. So we were missing a customer acquisition funnel there that we were able to add to the business.

Brett Curry:

Love it. And so then this actually directly ties into it. So this is strategy number three. Create more front end offers. So talk about that and how that's evolved for Boom, more front end offers.

Ezra Firestone:

I think that's mature business strategy. For Boom, we did 10 years where we had one front end offer, which was our Boomstick trio.

Brett Curry:

Yeah. Boomstick.

Ezra Firestone:

And all of our social proof, all of our sales funnel optimization, all of our pre-sales, all of our video ads, all of our email sequences, everything was about that front end offer. Just make that as deep as possible. Have marketing assets for it, loyalty assets for it. Just really work on that and scale that. And that's a lot easier to go deep rather than wide. And a lot of people have a thousand skews, and they can't do that. Like with this product, this brand, I bought, Overtone, I got a hundred skews. So it's hard for me to have one front end funnel.

Ezra Firestone:

But for low skew e-commerce, it's easy. You just pick whatever your widest and best seller, and most relevant seller is, and just focus on that. But once you scale that, now you got to start introducing new front end offers. There's only so many people who are interested in a multipurpose blush stick. Some people aren't interested in blush, but they're interested in mascara, or lip gloss, or brow gel, or whatever. So we've now introduced a bunch more products to the... You're right, my voice is kind of frozen. It's funny, I sound like a frog.

Brett Curry:

You're good, dude. Hey, you're so you're bringing the fire, even though I'm feeling cold for you.

Ezra Firestone:

I usually have such a rich, deep voice, man. Anyways, it gives us the ability to have more fish hooks in the sea.

Brett Curry:

Yeah. Love it. Love it. Let's go on to the next one, and this is related to number one, but this is now strategy number four.

Ezra Firestone:

By the way, another front end funnel is one of those lead gen funnels, too. Even if it's leading to the same product.

Brett Curry:

Yes.

Ezra Firestone:

It's a new top of funnel way of getting people in the mix. That's a new funnel. It doesn't have to be a new product.

Brett Curry:

Totally. And so looking at that, and what we've observed, working with Boom, working with other successful brands, is that a lot of them have one to three really successful top end funnels that they just push hard on, almost forever. And then with some tweaking and changing, and then you've got all your backend stuff as well. So, yeah. Really, really good. So let's talk then about strategy number four, growing your SMS subscribers. So diving into text based marketing. So, tips or suggestions you would give there for growing that list and utilizing SMS?

Ezra Firestone:

I mean, the 80/20 of SMS is this. Have the collection at checkout, where you're collecting people who check out from you, who click the little box to be collected. And have a two step opt in. First, get the email, second, incentivize for the SMS. So they come to your site, you say, "Hey, get 10% off, entering your email address". They enter it. "Hey, by the way, do you want an extra 5%? Give us your SMS". Klaviyo lets you do this, Postscript lets you do this, Attentive lets you do this, et cetera. Those are your two main ways to collect. And that's 85, 90% of the value. You can do other shit to collect, but it's not worth it. Just do that. And then when you send an abandoned card email and they don't open after 18 hours, slide a text in there, via Klaviyo. So connect it to your email logic, and do your-

Brett Curry:

Is that usually the way you do it, where you'll email first? And then if there's no response there, then you text?

Ezra Firestone:

Always. Yeah, because SMS is more expensive. So we'll use it as a... And you can only do this if you're using Klaviyo, because it talks to it. You can't have Attentive in Klaviyo, because they don't talk to each other. So if you're using Klaviyo, Klaviyo's a little more expensive for SMS, but if you're doing it the way I do, it doesn't matter, because you're only using it as a... You know? You're using it as a way to capture the people who aren't responding to email. Instead of just blasting them with both, and spending the money for that. So, if they don't respond to the card email, we'll slide an SMS. If we go purchase email, they don't cross-sell, we'll slide an SMS. And then once a week, you broadcast your bucket list with a piece of content or a sale. That's it. That's all you need to do. Have an opt in pre purchase, have an opt in at checkout, use it in your automation sequences, do one broadcast a week, your solid potato salad, you have 85% of the value you can get from SMS.

Brett Curry:

Yeah. You really go beyond that, it's just going to be tiny little gains. And potentially a difference-

Ezra Firestone:

It's not worth it. It's not worth it.

Brett Curry:

Not worth it. Not worth the effort.

Ezra Firestone:

Just spend your energy acquiring more customers.

Brett Curry:

Yeah, totally. And so those weekly broadcast on SMS, are you doing a mix of promotions and content?

Ezra Firestone:

So those will be content. The best piece of content from the week will drop via the SMS. And then if we're running a sale, that week, we won't send content, we'll send about the sale.

Brett Curry:

And your best piece of content pulling from the way Boom is doing it, it's based on blog, is that right? So you're writing blogs weekly or something?

Ezra Firestone:

We send three pieces of content to our list every week. Maybe it's a long form article, maybe it's a user generated content video, maybe it's a recap from a Facebook live we did. Whatever. We're sending content every week, at least three pieces, long form written articles, videos, user generated content. We've got a whole social media content engagement system. And so whatever worked the best that week, we'll drop to the SMS list. And then every six-

Brett Curry:

Nice. So you're emailing that content initially. So you're emailing-

Ezra Firestone:

Yeah, we're emailing that, we're posting it to the blog, we're posting out to social, we're amplifying it. We're doing the whole system. And then the best shit, we drop to the list, which links over to the blog. And we drop to the SMS list. And then every six weeks we're running a product launch or a sale. So that sixth week will be a promotion via SMS.

Brett Curry:

Got it. And anything you can say about response rates, metrics? How is SMS working in comparison to email? I know it's just designed to be a compliment to email, but anything you can say about stats, performance?

Ezra Firestone:

Yeah, I mean, SMS gets better response rates, but you have smaller lists. And you get way more unsubscribes. So it's-

Brett Curry:

And you got to be really careful about spam related stuff.

Ezra Firestone:

Yeah.

Brett Curry:

People get pretty hot on-

Ezra Firestone:

Yeah. Yeah. There's a lot you got to worry about with that. But basically it works really well, and you should use it as a compliment, and not instead of... And you should do what I'm talking about, which is basically 80/20 it.

Brett Curry:

Not really standalone. You're not going to just be like, "Hey, SMS is my one strategy."

Ezra Firestone:

Some brands do. Some brands do. But I think if you ignore email, what are we doing?

Brett Curry:

Right. For most people, it's just a beautiful compliment, and a way to really increase the effectiveness of email. But it is a compliment. Awesome. So now we're going to move into strategy number five. I actually love this one. I love all of them, this is all gold. But this is something that was kind of an aha moment for me. I first heard about a strategy like this, it was made be Dan Kennedy back in the day, maybe Jay Abraham. I go way back, man, looking at marketing stuff. But you're talking about inventing a holiday. So there's this idea that people need a reason why. They need a reason why I should buy now, they need a reason why your product is better. And sometimes an invented holiday is a great reason why you should buy now. So, talk about invented holidays, and talk about what you're doing at Boom.

Ezra Firestone:

So excuses to communicate are important. And we take everyone we can. We communicate on Earth Day, we communicate on Animal Friendly Day, we communicate on National Dog Day. Because people like that kind of shit.

Brett Curry:

They do. People like it.

Ezra Firestone:

And everybody has a dog, and everybody likes the earth, and so on and so forth. And we do too. And so we are always doing emails like that. Like, "Hey, it's Earth Day. And you know what? We care a lot about sustainability. And these are our most sustainable products, for these reasons." And whatever. And so we're constantly mailing on using the fake or created holidays as a reason to communicate on social and on email. And so we made up our own. We made Pro-Age Month. We are the first people to say pro-age. Now it's a commonly known thing. Now you've got a million knock brands, but we spent 40 million over six years, popularizing the concept of pro-age, back in 2010. And now Allure is stealing it, and it's like we have penetrated the mainstream with this.

Brett Curry:

It's awesome.

Ezra Firestone:

We've entered the zeitgeist with this concept. And so now it's a thing. And so we want to claim ownership of that, because we do own it. You don't never own an idea, but we created that movement. And so we created Pro-Age Month. And the month of August is Pro-Age Month. And we tell pro-age stories, and we've got a logo for it. And we are claiming our rights to the pro-age movement. The pro-age revolution that we started in 2010. And a good way to do that, was to create a holiday around it.

Brett Curry:

Create a holiday, create a month, and people love that. And it's such a great conversation starter and connection point. And if you think about one of the big components of building a brand, is just building that connection and that community. And sometimes odd or unusual holidays do that. And inventing your own holiday, I think it's brilliant. I think more people should look at it. And I think a lot of brands lend themselves well. Maybe it's not pro-age for you, and Ezra owns that anyway, so back off, really. Seriously.

Ezra Firestone:

I mean, whatever. You could say pro-age if you believe in that. What I find, is most people say pro-age and they don't actually know what it means. Which is hilarious. They'll be like, "Pro-age..." this or that. And then they'll have anti-aging skin drops.

Brett Curry:

Yeah. "But cover your gray, and no more wrinkles." Yeah, yeah.

Ezra Firestone:

You've missed the point here.

Brett Curry:

Yeah. Yeah. But inventing a holiday, pure gold, I love it. Anybody can do it. And so highly recommend that as well. So we're getting tied on time, so we're going to have to maybe move rapid fire through some of these or just save some of them for the blog. But number six is, list products on Amazon.

Ezra Firestone:

Yeah.

Brett Curry:

What are you guys doing there for your brands? Talk about that a little bit.

Ezra Firestone:

Amazon will make up 20 to 30% of a good brand's sales. And you're going to miss those customers if you're not over there. And our-

Brett Curry:

Because some people only buy on Amazon. That's just it.

Ezra Firestone:

I mean, yeah. And we waited 10 years to put our products on Amazon, because we could fill the demand that we had with... Our supply chain could barely fill the demand we had from direct to consumer. But once we beefed up our supply chain, and we realized that adding to Amazon wasn't going to cannibalize our direct to consumer platform, we added our main product on there, and it just crushed. It just added 10 to 15% of incremental sales.

Brett Curry:

Immediately. Yeah.

Ezra Firestone:

So now we're adding every one of our products, once every two months, onto Amazon. You guys are running all of our ads over there, doing all of our A plus lists. All we do is do the customer support, and create the assets for the page. You guys literally do everything else. You run all the ads, you optimize all the pages, you handle all the seller support. You do fucking everything for us. So it's great for us, because it's a channel that really works, that we don't really have the expertise for, that you just do for us. I mean, we pay you for it, but probably not what you should get paid. Because I think you give us a deal. But-

Brett Curry:

We do. We do. But, gladly. We gladly give you that deal, for sure.

Ezra Firestone:

Yeah. So it's been really good for us.

Brett Curry:

Yeah, it's been amazing, it's been fun to execute on our end for sure. And one thing we noticed with you, we noticed this with native ... as well, client, friends. And we don't run their Amazon, but we observe. We run their Google and YouTube. Is that there's some expectation that when you launch on Amazon, there's going to be some cannibalization of your store's sales. And certainly that happens some, but this has been mostly incremental growth for you guys, right?

Ezra Firestone:

100% incremental. There's been no cannibalization whatsoever. Which is crazy, because I was sure there was going to be. We sell it at the same price, and some people just like to buy over there. And I think what was happening was a lot of people were seeing our ads on Facebook, going to buy on Amazon, not finding it, and then buying knockoff brands. Because they only buy on Amazon.

Brett Curry:

Buying something else. Buy knockoff. Yeah, we experienced that. That'd be a topic for another podcast. The copycats and the people that were...

Ezra Firestone:

...

Brett Curry:

... really leeching off of your brand name on Amazon.

Ezra Firestone:

Nightmare.

Brett Curry:

But yeah, nightmare for sure. For sure. But we're getting there. So yeah, big believer in Amazon. And what's interesting to me, and this is where Boom and Overtone are set up perfectly for Amazon, is that success on Amazon in the long term, and I think even right now, is based on building a brand. So taking the community building aspect, the brand building aspect that you're doing off Amazon, and do that on Amazon, that's where you see long term success. It's not just hacking the titles and the keywords, and the bullet points, to try to inflate your ranking, or using super URLs, or some other strategy to hack your ranking, but building a real brand.

Brett Curry:

And that's what you guys are good at, and that's what we're helping you with. And it's working. It's working on Amazon right now. So let's talk, and this will probably be our final concept for the podcast, and I'll push the final one, people to go check out on the blog post. But the seventh strategy for growth, is advertising on television. TV? What? Come on now. So what are your thoughts on TV? And this has been fun to watch too, but what are your thoughts on advertising on television?

Ezra Firestone:

I think it's really only for very, very, very mature brands. Because the minimum that you need to do it is 350 grand. Minimum. Just to test. And that's a two month test. And you also have to produce television quality ads. Now we were able to use user generated content. We spent 50 grand on a TV commercial produced by a fancy agency, and at flopped all crazy. And then we made our own ad, based on UGC that we had. And we crushed. So we're much better direct response advertisers than these TV agencies, it turns out. Which we should've known, because we've been fucking running direct response ads for 15 years. Makes sense we would know what would work, versus what they produced. Even though what they produced, it was a whole... We could talk about that another time. It wasn't very good.

Brett Curry:

Yeah. Yeah.

Ezra Firestone:

But it's hard to tell how successful TV has been for us. We've spent about half a million dollars over the course of six months, and I think incrementally, it has been successful. But we're having Northbeam, which is a company you hooked us up with.

Brett Curry:

Shout out to Northbeam, Austin, and the folks there.

Ezra Firestone:

We just turned it off, and looks like sales are down 15K a day since we turned off TV. We'll see. I think TV is great for omnichannel presence. If you're spending three, four, 500K a month on social media ads, you should add in TV at 10, 15% of your budget, to reach more people, and reach the people that you're reaching on social in a different area. And for us, we just turned it off to see how it's going to impact whether we run it or not. And so we're still trying to figure out the attribution on it, and how well it's working. But our sense is that it worked pretty well.

Brett Curry:

Yeah. And that's a great way to test it. Turn it off, see what the impact is there. And it also helps tremendously to have a tool like Northbeam, third party attribution. Brilliant stuff, check it out. And we're seeing some similar things. So first of all, I got my start in TV, radio, print. So I still really like TV. I'm still involved in local TV just a little bit with a friend of mine. But I love this strategy. I think it is for bigger brands. But yeah, if you're spending multi six figures on Facebook ads, YouTube ads, then TV may be something that you check out. But along a similar vein, we're testing now, we tested it with Boom and with a few other clients. Creating some awareness, we call it awareness layer YouTube campaigns.

Brett Curry:

And again, you kind of need something like Northbeam in place, to really see the impact of this. But the idea there, is as well we're just going for low cost engagement, low cost views. We're seeing CPMs for some of these awareness level YouTube campaigns at six bucks, five bucks, which is crazy low. But there's something to be said, and this is marketing 101, old school stuff. If you talk to the right people enough times, with a right message, so right message, right market, right media, you're going to get results. And so obviously you got to be ready for it with budget, and you have to have the tracking in place to really make good use of it. But I love that you guys are testing TV. And I also love the fact that it wasn't the super duper polished stuff that worked. It was what we do. The UGC stuff that did well on TV, too.

Ezra Firestone:

Yeah. It was UGC. And we started doing video view advertising on Facebook, when iOS 14.5 happened, because Facebook lost all its data. So we started running video view campaigns to all the audiences that we used to run conversion campaigns to, to let Facebook build up some data of the people who watched most of our videos. And then we would follow up with those people and run conversion ads to them. And now we're doing that with YouTube as well. And I think that strategy post iOS 14.5 on both networks, where you spend a thousand bucks a day at our scale, running video views, or maybe 10% of your overall spend, is a great strategy. We're doing it at Overtone too.

Brett Curry:

Yeah, that's awesome. Well, this has been amazing, Ezra. So that's seven of the eight tips. Hey, to get that eighth tip, check out the show notes, go check out Ezra's blog, smartmarketer.com, and get that final one. But Ezra, as people are listening, I know we got some super fans-

Ezra Firestone:

I'm cold, man. I'm cold. That's what's going on.

Brett Curry:

You're cold. Then yeah, you need to go warm up, dude.

Ezra Firestone:

I do. I need ...

Brett Curry:

Get your robe, get your blanket, go sit by the fire, or something like that. But for those that are listening and thinking, "I need more Ezra Firestone in my life." How can they connect with you, where should they learn more about you? Where should they do that?

Ezra Firestone:

I'm on Instagram @ezrafirestone, I'm on Twitter @ezrafirestone, I'm on Facebook, Facebook.com/MeetEzra. I'm on smartmarketer.com, which is a blog that I have, I'm on zipify.com, which are my apps for Shopify. But you can find me on social media. I'm on YouTube, all the social media networks. Whatever ones you use, I'm there. You can Google me on there or search me on there. And yeah. Thanks for hanging out, hope it's been some kind of helpful. Appreciate you, Brett. I love that you're between two ferns over there.

Brett Curry:

That's a hilarious show. And you're not the first person to say that. They're like, "Dude, are you between two ferns here? Are you Zach Galifianakis or what? What are you doing?" I'm a little more courteous to my guests and a little more on topic, but that show is hilarious.

Ezra Firestone:

It's awesome, dude.

Brett Curry:

But another plug that I'll make here as I'm sitting between two ferns, is, do check out Smart Marketer. Molly Pittman, John Grimshaw, running that with Ezra's leadership, Ezra started it. But some amazing resources there. Train My Traffic Person. So if you got in-house media buyers, you need to send them through Train My Traffic Person. You get to learn from me too, I'm a faculty member there teaching YouTube and teaching Google. But check that out, smartmarketer.com. Highly, Highly recommend it.

Ezra Firestone:

Thank y'all.

Brett Curry:

Awesome. Ezra, appreciate it, brother. This has been amazing, thank you so much. And see you next time.

Ezra Firestone:

Talk soon.

‍

I’ve never met anyone quite like Miki Agrawal.

‍

She’s incredibly creative. No really. She once hosted a “funeral for a tree” at an old cathedral in NYC hosted by comedians and actors. It drew a crowd of thousands, generated millions in free press and helped shed light on the toilet paper waste that her company TUSHY can help solve. 

‍

She understands trends in marketing. She knows how to grab attention. So much so that she was banned by the NY   transit authority from running subway ads. Which led to a PR fight that she won…and in the end, got more press and attention than if they hadn’t been banned. 

‍

She’s also warm and kind and FUN. 

‍

She’s created multiple 9-Figure businesses and has garnered some pretty incredible recognition. She was named "Fast Company's Most Creative People", “Young Global Leader” by the World Economic Forum and INC's “Most Impressive Women Entrepreneurs”.

‍

She’s also the author of #1 best selling books Do Cool SH*T and Disrupt-HER.

‍

In this episode we unpack Miki’s wacky, impossible-to-forget and wildly successful marketing strategies and tactics.

‍

Here’s a look at what we cover:

‍

• How Miki was banned from advertising on the NYC subway and turned that into a huge PR win for her brand THINX
• How to use Accessible + Relatable language 
• How to create ads that are both effective and “fridge worthy”
• How iteration is perfection
• How to start with play to create great ideas

‍

Mentioned in This Episode:

Miki Agrawal

   - Website

   - Instagram

   - Link Tree to Resources

TUSHY

   - Website

   - Instagram

Thinx

   - Website

   - Instagram

Wild

   - Website

   - Instagram

“Do Cool Sh*t” by Miki Agrawal

“Disrupt-Her” by Miki Agrawal

“Zero To $100 Million” on Mindvalley‍

Cap Con 5
Ryan Daniel Moran‍

Toto‍

“Funeral for a Tree” by TUSHY video on YouTube‍

Butt Con by TUSHY

Transcript:

Brett:

Welcome to the Spicy Curry Podcast. We explore hot topics on eCommerce and digital marketing. We feel feature some of the brightest minds, with some of the SPT perspectives on what it takes to grow your business. Season one of this podcast is built on the old business adage that, what it really takes to succeed is three things. One: have something good to say. Two: say it well. And three: say it often.

Brett:

My guest in this episode is Miki Agrawal. She's the founder of TUSHY, but she's also the entrepreneur behind several other wildly successful companies. I don't know anyone better than Miki at the, have something good to say and say it well, aspects of growth. And so just a couple of accolades. Miki was named one of Fast Company's Most Creative People. She was also named by Inc Magazine as one of the Most Impressive Women Entrepreneurs. She was also my favorite speaker, and she's also one of the favorite speakers that most of the events that she attends.

Brett:

We're going to dive into some crazy wild stories from her entrepreneur journeys. We're going to learn why she was banned by the New York subway from running ads there, and how she actually overcame that and then ran some pretty powerful ads on the New York subway system. We're going to talk about how she creates events that are just, blow your mind. Like, they had a funeral for a tree, and there's a reason why they did that and got millions of dollars in free press. And she talks about how to craft things that are both artful and fridge worthy, but also effective. And so, I think you're going to absolutely love this interview. And so, lean in, buckle up and enjoy this interview with Miki Agrawal.

Brett:

Over 81% of consumers are opted into text message messages from their favorite brands, and that's where Attentive comes in. Meet Attentive, the company helping thousands of innovative brands connect with their customers through personalized text messaging. Attentive's text marketing platform lets you grow your subscriber list, interact with customers in real time through two-way conversations and drive the war revenue. Brands who use Attentive see $55 in sales for every $1 they spend. See what Attentive can do for you, at attentivemobile.com/omgcommerce. Attentive: drive sales with text message marketing.

Brett:

All right, well today I am abs absolutely thrilled that my guest is Miki Agrawal. Now, I was recently at an event, CapCon 5 in Austin, Texas. My good friend, Ryan Daniel Moran was the host. And there was a star-studded lineup of speakers. Amazing, blow your mind speakers. And I got to say, Miki was probably my favorite. And I hope that some of my other friends that were speaking don't hear this, because I don't want to hurt their feelings. It's just that Miki was amazing. And so, Miki is the founder of a number of really transformative businesses. Most recently, TUSHY. Also, THINX and WILD. She's also author of some amazing best-selling books. Do Cool Sh*t. Disrupt-Her, which I'm actually in the process, I've gone about halfway through it right now. And even though it has "her" in the title, Disrupt-Her, instead of disruptor, it's for dudes too. Right, Miki? And so, I'm actually getting a lot of value out of it. And so, we're going to talk about growth and having an amazing marketing message, and thinking differently and all kinds of great stuff. So Miki, welcome to the show, and how's it going?

Miki:

Yes. I'm so happy to be here with you. And just, the thing that I just can't, I'm just so like, I love is that you have eight children, and you're sitting at the table with 10 people every night for dinner. That just blows my mind.

Brett:

Yeah. The level of noise at the dinner table is sometimes crazy. And we do this thing called highs and lows, where everybody goes around and tells their high of the day. You have to have a high of the day, you don't have to have a low of the day if you don't want to, but it is required to have a high. And the noise level is crazy, but it's also super fun.

Miki:

I love that you do that. That's beautiful, that's amazing.

Brett:

Yeah. So, part of what attracted me to you, Miki, and why I was so thrilled to chat with you afterwards. Is one, you're a master marketer. And the way you craft messages and the way you get attention, it's mind blowing, which is awesome. But you're also like, you believe in strong women, right? And I've got six daughters and I just, I want them to conquer the world. That's probably a weird thing to say, but I want them to just do whatever they feel led and whatever they feel passionate about doing. And so, love the energy you bring and the inspiration you're bringing to young women as well.

Miki:

Six daughters. I mean, it's just, yeah. Like, I think about the food bill just for that dinner, just for those meals, just now. It's just [crosstalk 00:05:10].

Brett:

The food bill is crazy. So I'm happy to talk about that with anyone offline. Yeah. So, when you include groceries and eating out, it's a median household income. It's a lot of money, yeah. But grateful to be able to do it. I wouldn't have it any other way, but it is completely [crosstalk 00:05:28].

Miki:

I love it.

Brett:

So yeah, it's awesome. Well, let's talk about a few things. So if you would Miki, give people kind of just the quick background on you. Because we're going to dig into some of the specific messages that you use at TUSHY and things like that. But give people the background. Like, how did you become this, because not only were you my favorite speaker at CapCon, but I've seen, you were voted best speaker at Inc and Fast Company, and some of these other big events. Everybody loves what you have to say. So really, how did you get here?

Miki:

Well, I'm one of three children, and the interesting fun fact about the three of us is that we are all born within one year. So I have an identical twin sister. The third sister, who's 11 months older. So we're actually, we're Irish twins.

Brett:

Yeah, Irish twins and identical twins [crosstalk 00:06:18].

Miki:

Irish triplets.

Brett:

Okay.

Miki:

So we're twins, plus Irish triplets, yeah.

Brett:

It's insane.

Miki:

Yeah. And then we grew up to a Japanese mother and Indian father. So my mother's from Japan, speaks with a thick Japanese accent. My dad is from India, speaks with a very thick Indian accent.

Brett:

I'm doing the audio book of Disrupt-Her. And you do the Indian accent for your dad, an it's just amazing. You do such a good job, yeah.

Miki:

But yeah, his most, the thing they always say is, he says, when he meets somebody, he goes, "Very good vibes". Or, "Very bad vibes." And immediately, because yeah, he can sniff people out just by "their vibes".

Brett:

By "their vibes", okay, I love that.

Miki:

By "their vibes".

Brett:

That's awesome.

Miki:

Yeah. And I grew up in Montreal, Canada. In French Montreal, in the south shore of Montreal. In a town called [foreign language 00:07:12]. And it's like, I grew up in French, like literally, we were the token Asians in the most French neighborhood ever. And so, it was really beautiful to grow up in this true mosaic of cultures. Japan, India, French, American. And then of course, Canada attracts so many, I mean, every culture, every religion, and they're all celebrated. And so of course, growing up in a household of just diversity and then going to school with just all diverse kids, I think we just learned to question everything. And to look at things from different angles. To be like, oh, this is how the Indians look at it, this is how the Japanese look it, how the French look at it, and the Americans look at it, this is how the Canadians look at it.

Brett:

It forces a fresh perspective, rather than just everybody being the same.

Miki:

Totally. So it's a mosaic versus melting pot thinking. And I think that that mosaic thinking creates beautiful picture. When you think about a mosaic image, and it's just this, all these colors and all these textures, and all of the different historical context of things, creates a different frame than just a single pain. So I think I was very blessed in just being born where I was born, to be given the various perspectives. To not just be like, okay, this is the way it is. It's like, wait, is this, or should I question it? And is there a better way, or is there more thoughtful way? Or that kind of thing.

Brett:

When did you realize that, hey, I might be an entrepreneur? Or have you ever? Like, is that really a conscious thought? Like, when did you think, hey, I'm going to build companies? And not just companies, but wildly successful and disruptive companies.

Miki:

Yeah. I mean, I think I'm just genuinely unemployable. I think I'm just like, you're not my Indian father. That kind of vibes. Where like, anytime someone told me what to do, blood would rush to my head and I would just get really frustrated. I would, I don't know, get triggered or something. But no, I think I just always beat to my own drum. And I think because of this questioning, because of this philosophy of looking at things from different perspectives, I think I just always had different ideas that I wanted to put out in the world. That entrepreneurship, when it was introduced to me, I remember, I'll never forget. I met my very first entrepreneur, standing in line in New York City when I was 22 years old, at this Armani party.

Miki:

I was invited to my very first VIP door, or whatever. [crosstalk 00:09:47] And I was like, oh my God, I'm so cool. It was like, Armani. You know, whatever. Back when it was really cool to go to those things. And I remember standing in line, and in front of me was this gentleman who I'd met. And his name was Graham, and he's now since become one of my dearest friends. But I met him randomly, standing in line in front of me then. I was 22, and he was in his mid-thirties when I met him. And I was like, "oh". Like, "What are you up to?"

Miki:

And he's like, "I'm an entrepreneur."

Miki:

And I was like, "What do you mean?"

Miki:

And he is like, "I have my own business." And this is, by the way, in 2001, when entrepreneurship wasn't a school thing. Nobody was getting invested in, it wasn't a thing. I mean, Facebook wasn't even there until 2006.

Brett:

Now it's super trendy. Everybody wants to say entrepreneur, stamped that on their [crosstalk 00:10:33].

Miki:

Now, everyone. But back then, nobody. It was doctor, lawyer, investment banker, management consultant. Going to work for a company. Becoming a whatever at a company. Becoming a person who starts a business was just not even in the lexicon, in the zeitgeist of culture back then.

Miki:

And he was like, "I'm not in firm."

Miki:

I'm like, "What do you mean?"

Miki:

He's like, "I have my own company."

Miki:

I'm like, "Well, what do you do?"

Miki:

And he's like, "Well, I started a company called treehugger.com."

Miki:

And I was like, "Oh, that's cool."

Miki:

And he's like, "And I sold it." I think he sold it to Discovery Channel, whatever.

Miki:

And I was like, "Wow!" And then he, the next day, invited me to this brunch with a bunch of other entrepreneurs. And that's when it was my big ding, ding, ding moment. I can start my own company, I'm going to do that. And I think in life, we just get given these gifts of chance meetings. And either we kind of get opened by it or we close to it. And I was sort of just blasted open by the possibilities of that. And I think that's what really put me on the course of this new way of thinking and being, and then carrying forward.

Brett:

That's amazing. And I do want to, let's give kind of a brief overview of some of the companies. Just to give people some texture and some more context. So your mind was blown, and you're thinking, I could do my own thing. And then you have, and you've been wildly successful. Really at, essentially, everything. But can you give a quick rundown of the companies, and what they've done?

Miki:

Yeah. Well, I will first start by saying, one of the biggest stories that changed the course my life was when I was 22. After that time, 9/11 happened, and that was a huge turning point in my life.

Brett:

Yeah, because you were an investment banker, working down on Wall Street, right?

Miki:

Yes. The World Trade center was my subway stop every single morning. And it I was working at Deutsche Bank, in investment banking. I call it douche bank.

Brett:

Wow. Someone was asking for that, honestly, right? Deutche Bank, it's so close to douche, you're going to make the jokes, yeah.

Miki:

Know what I mean? Yeah. So yeah, when I was there, yeah, 9/11 happened. I was supposed to be there, and 2 World Trade Center was my subway stop every single morning. And I would walk upstairs to 2 World Trade Center, at the cafe there. And I would get tea with my girlfriend, who worked on the 100th floor. And then I would walk across the street to my office, directly across 2 World Trade Center. And then 9/11 happened, and it was the first day of my life, the only day of my life that I slept through my alarm clock.

Brett:

That is crazy and amazing.

Miki:

Yeah. And 700 people in my girlfriend's office died on that day. Two people in my office died. It was one of those, just like, you can't make this shit up. Like, this is not a real movie, that kind of level of unfathomableness.

Brett:

Unfathomable, yeah.

Miki:

Yeah. And so that single experience, again, it's those moments that I kind of really recognize as these turning points in my life. And that was a big turning point in my life. Where I was like, wow, I could die tomorrow. And when you're 22, you don't think about death. I feel like we start thinking about death after we have children, in a lot of ways. And I'm just always making sure I'm not going to die. Do you know? And I'm sure, with your eight children, I don't even know how [inaudible 00:13:50]. You know?

Brett:

Yeah.

Miki:

But death, it's just not a thing, when you're a kid, when you're 22, you're just sort of like, whatever.

Brett:

You're usually not thinking about it at all, yeah.

Miki:

Just not thinking at all. But then, because I had this near potential death experience, and people around me died, and I was just sort of like, wow, this is a real thing. And I really felt my mortality in that moment. And it was like, wow, I got to make every single day count.

Brett:

Got to do something, yeah. We're going to blink and we're going to be 70, right? And so, what are you going to fill your time with now? Yeah.

Miki:

That's right. And so yeah, for me, it was, I wrote down three things. The first was to play soccer professionally, the second was to make movies, and the third was to start a business. And that sort of set me on sort of a total path after 9/11,.I played soccer for the New York Magic, I worked in the film industry for a couple of years, and then I started my first business, which was in the restaurant space. And so, my first business was born out of a stomach ache. We know that famous thing, necessity is the mother of invention.

Brett:

Yes, so true.

Miki:

Yeah. So the first business was born out of a stomach ache, and I couldn't eat pizza anymore. It was my favorite comfort food, but I just couldn't eat anymore because it made me bloated and gassy, and just so gross feeling after I ate it. And it was full of bleached flour, processed cheese, sugar-filled sauces, processed toppings, it was all that. And so yeah, I basically started New York City's very first gluten free alternative pizza concept. And 17 and a half years later, we're still in business. Almost 18 years this year. In November, 18 years.

Brett:

Amazing. And it's called WILD, correct?

Miki:

Called WILD. Just go to @eatdrinkwild on Instagram. We have a couple locations in New York City, and one in Guatemala.

Brett:

And [crosstalk 00:15:42] for surviving the pandemic. I couldn't imagine owning a restaurant during the pandemic in New York City. That had to been just absolutely brutal. So grateful, yeah.

Miki:

It was nuts. My partner Walid is incredible, and he's such an ingenious person. He has lots of [inaudible 00:15:57]. Where actually what we did was, we opened up, on Seamless Web, three restaurants, out of our restaurants. So during the pandemic, not only did we have our regular standard fair, but we opened up two different restaurants, working out of our kitchen. So basically, we made tacos and we did burgers, or whatever, so that people could order from us multiple times a week.

Brett:

Oh, super smart, super [crosstalk 00:16:24].

Miki:

So, take away. And not just have our gluten-free pizza stuff every week, but they would have tacos one night, and different stuff. And so we just opened three different restaurants under the same roof during the pandemic. And then we got the outdoor cafe seating. And that, our business all came back. And it was actually incredible, because it felt like a bit of Europe being in New York, with all the outdoor cafes everywhere, and people walking around with the menu. It was just, it was very romantic, very beautiful. So the rest restaurants was the very first business I learned. I think I learned so much of the thesis around people and psychology in my restaurants, that then led to building Thinks and led to building TUSHY. Both now valued over nine figures, well over nine. And so I, what I learned at WILD was, when I stood outside my restaurant for almost seven years, handing out little pieces of pizza, just handing them out.

Brett:

That's how you grew the business, was samples, yeah.

Miki:

Exactly, yeah. And getting people to try. And I would also test. Like, if I said healthy pizza, people wouldn't come. But if I said, farmed fresh, healthy farm to table pizza, people would be like, oh, what does that mean?

Brett:

Yeah. Nobody wants healthy pizza. That sounds cardboard.

Miki:

Exactly.

Brett:

But farm to table pizza, interesting. And so, you were testing out those messages as people were walking by?

Miki:

AB testing, literally like email, subject heading.

Brett:

I love that.

Miki:

You know? And it was such, seven years of, it was genuinely like double PhD in human psychology and what led people to come closer to attract them, or to kind of move them back. And it was a really interesting thing. Just by standing, literally person by person, like hand to hand combat, just really getting to know people.

Brett:

Fascinating.

Miki:

And that experience led to this thesis, understanding, that again, built THINX and TUSHY. Which was having a best in class product. Like, if someone bit into it and they're like, Ugh.

Brett:

It doesn't matter, yeah.

Miki:

[crosstalk 00:18:30] my underwear. Like tight now, I'm wearing my period-proof underwear. It was so amazing because, I started my period today, I went to my bathroom. You're like, I have six daughters, don't worry about it.

Brett:

So, it does not bother me in the least. Like, yeah, this is a common conversation around my house, yeah.

Miki:

Yeah.

Brett:

Think of the podcast first, though. First to confess on the podcast, which I embrace this, I welcome, this is awesome.

Miki:

First of all, every single human being is here because of a women's period. So, you're welcome. You know?

Brett:

Yes.

Miki:

[crosstalk 00:18:59] Be more uncomfortable. Yeah. So today, this morning, I went to the bathroom and I was kind of like, there's a little bit of blood everywhere. And so I basically sat on my toilet, used my TUSHY bidet, washed myself clean, And then put my THINX underwear on. And I was just like, ah.

Brett:

You're like, this is amazing.

Miki:

I solved my own problem twice. Just now, in this moment. And that's when I was like, yeah, this is why these businesses are doing well. Because genuinely, they truly, truly, truly solve problems that we face every single day.

Brett:

Authentically solving the problem, not just identifying a problem and kind of addressing it just for a cash grab, but you authentically solve the problem.

Miki:

Needed it, yeah. Which is why in my book, Do Cool Sh*t, I talk about the three questions I always ask myself before starting any business. The first question is, what sucks in my world? That's to start with me, a problem in my world that sucks. And then question number two is, but does it suck for a lot of people? Because if it just sucks for me, then I'm kind of a diva or whatever, and who cares. [crosstalk 00:20:04].

Miki:

And then the third question, which I think is the most important. Which is, can I be passionate about this issue, cause, or community, for a really long time. We know the saying, it takes 10 years to be an overnight success. People don't want to sit in that discomfort for a really, really long time, and then they quit or decide to leave early, and they don't kind of get through it. I think about the entrepreneurs, I think about the musicians, I think about the actors, I think about all the people in my life who've made it. And they've made it because they've kind of grinded for a really long time. And they made through it, and they just stuck with their passion, they stuck with the thing they truly believed in. And so I think, yeah, what sucks in my world, has sucked for a lot of people. Can I be passionate about this issue? I think the passion piece is the most important. [crosstalk 00:20:49]

Brett:

It's super important. And this is something I think you may have shared at CapCon already with somebody else. But, tactics without the underlying passion are worthless or it's going to be short lived. Tactics only work for so long. Like, you've got to have that passion and that drive to push through all the messy and confusing and heartache and suffering that you have to go through as a business owner. And so yeah, the passion is super, super important.

Brett:

Now, why do you think you're so attracted to difficult things to sell? So we'll start with pizza first. So, selling healthy, gluten free pizza. When you started the business, gluten free wasn't trendy. Like, gluten free wasn't a selling point. It's not something you want to stick on all your labels. Because people were like, what are you even talking about?

Miki:

Yeah. And no one was talking about farm to table, no one was talking about [crosstalk 00:21:36], no one was talking about seasonal.

Brett:

None of that.

Miki:

This is in 2003-2004. I mean, it was still super nascent, all of those conversations, it was extremely different.

Brett:

Yeah. And when you started THINX, which is period-proof underwear, no one was really talking about periods. Or, not wanting to talk about it. And maybe some people don't want to talk about now. [crosstalk 00:21:50] But yeah, you just got to get over it. But then also TUSHY, a bidet. I still remember so many conversations just as stuff started to get in the news. People were like, "Oh, bidets are nasty."

Brett:

And I'm like, "How is it nasty to use water to clean yourself versus dry paper?" But anyway, you're choosing these categories that are difficult. Like, it's new to people or taboo to people. Why do you think [crosstalk 00:22:13]?

Miki:

Well, it's a culture shift that I'm interested in. I think from a creative perspective and as a creative challenge. Like, how do you change people's behavior, is the hardest change to make. And then how, how do you utilize innovation and creativity to do that? And so I think from a creative kind of person's perspective, it's like, wow, this is a really fun challenge to tackle. How do you get someone to change their behavior when it comes to food? When it comes to habits? Daily habits that they've been doing their whole lives, not even their whole lives, but for generations. To get them to try something new, and not only try it, but adopt it fully. I mean, that is why Toto hasn't made it to America yet. That is why the tampons and pads, which were invented by men, which is fine. But not that fine, cause they're made for women. So it's just, it's like, those are the most pervasive products in the world, because it's taboo. And so, how do we enter these conversations in a way that's artful? In a way that's accessible, and we're using the best in class product?

Miki:

And I think those, my thesis that I learned from the pizza, from the restaurants was that was that, was the three prong. Prong number one is best in class product. It has to be a best in class product. It has to be a big day that, when I clip to my toilet, it actually feels good, it looks good.

Brett:

It adds to the appearance of your bathroom. Like, it makes your bathroom feel better, cleaner.

Miki:

It makes it more upscale and cool. It makes people want to bring you to their bathroom when you're having a dinner party. You know like that? Or when you're wearing THINX, like when I'm wearing my underwear right now, I feel really sexy in them. I feel really taken care of in them. I know that I'm protect, I know that this product works. So, best in class product. The pizza, when I eat it, it tastes the most delicious pizza. It doesn't even taste gluten and free, it tastes the most delicious pizza you've ever tasted. So, best in class product, no question, that is baseline. Second prong, to really shift culture, is art. Using art to really challenge conversations.

Miki:

And I talked a little bit about this at CapCon. When I remember putting our first TUSHY ads up, or our first period ads up, out in the world, whether online or offline. People's first reaction were like, wow, that's so beautiful. And then their second reaction's, oh my God, they're talking about poop, they're talking about periods. Like, oh my [crosstalk 00:24:49]. But their very first reaction was leaning into the art and the beauty of that. And I think that, that opens up people's hearts and minds. Art just does that, and for everyone at every level, does that. It opens, art just gives people something to lean into. And I think when they're leaning into something, it makes them be curious. And so the first thing is, can we design from a lens of art? So, we hired all artists, we hired all creatives. I think art is such a beautiful lens to shift people's perspective. I mean, that's why people go to museums, people look at magazines, people look at nature as art. And a place to go and really open up our souls, open up our perspectives, change the way we look and see things.

Miki:

And I think that really lends itself to giving people the space to question their existing thinking. And I think that's all we need to do, is give them that space to question, and they can make the decision for themselves. And so then, that's the artfulness, the best in class innovation.

Miki:

And then the third part is the accessible, relatable language. I think we so often want to be so heady, and so clinical, and so technical, and so medical, and so academic, and sound really smart. And make everyone feel we've been and doing all this patent pending work and whatever. And it's just like, people don't care. They want to know, does it work? Does it make me feel good? Does it support me and does it support my life? Like, what's the point of this? Like, I don't care about your terminology.

Brett:

Patent pending.

Miki:

And like, I don't care about high sounding or smart. Like, whatever. And then, I tested all of that. That was all tested. I learned that, the more we speak from our space of truth, the more we speak from our place of that lit fire inside. We talked about that at CapCon as well. The more we speak from that real, true, authentic place, people respond. Because it's real, it's true. It's not coming from like, I wonder what they want me to say? And I'm just going to say it that way. That doesn't feel good, to receive that kind of inauthentic message. Like, imagine if you're receiving a text message from a best friend. And you can tell when they're being inauthentic or they're authentic. You can tell when your sister or brother is being authentic, you can tell when your wife or husband is being inauthentic or authentic.

Miki:

And so it's just that, can we write copy, can we text, can we write our messaging in the same way as we're texting our best friend? And I think that is such an important way to think about messaging to people. Because we're just being bombarded with advertisements, with so much people shouting at us. And we don't want that. We want authentic truth, we just want that juicy truth. And I think that truth is really what, that truth, coupled with art, coupled with the right beautiful aesthetic, the right innovation that you would want to use where, on a daily basis. That together, creates change, creates culture shift. And I've seen that time and time again. Across Wild, across THINX and across TUSHY. All three of them share the same philosophy of best in class product, artful aesthetic design across every touchpoint of our brand, and accessible, relatable language across every touchpoint of the brand.

Brett:

I love it so much. And really, when you combine all of that, plus you go back to the starting point from your first book, Do Cool Sh*t, it has to be addressing something that sucks for you and sucks for a lot of people. Right? So it's got to be that. And so then, when it's addressing a real issue, and then you've got the artful design and best in class, and it works. And you got the accessible, relatable language. All that comes together and it just works.

Brett:

The Spicy Curry Podcast is brought to you by Zipify's OneClickUpsell. OneClickUpsell can increase your Shopify revenue by 10-15% overnight. Created by my friend, Ezra Firestone, the owner of a $155 million brand. And it's trusted by over 11,000 Shopify merchants. OneClickUpsell helps you boost your average order value with targeted upsells and cross sells. And it includes mobile optimized offer pages that drive sky high conversions. Plus, it comes with built in split testing for maximizing your results. It's no wonder that OneClickUpsell has made its users an extra $294 million in sales. It only takes a few minutes to install the app, launch your first upsell and start generating 10-15% more revenue overnight. Get a 30 day free trial and test it out for yourself, at zipify.com.

Brett:

What's so interesting and what was so powerful for me. And I remember talking to the guy that was sitting next to me at CapCon, and I made a couple comments about this. I've been in the ad world for a long time. So there's the brand building space of advertising, which is interesting. There's direct response, which I followed and studied for a long time. And I've worked in the infomercial space and stuff. But you have this ability to create stuff that looks beautiful. Like, you just want to look at it. It's an ad for a bidet, but you want to look at it. But, it also kind of makes you say, I'd like to try that. Like, I would like a clean butt too. I would to do...

Brett:

Because I think sometimes people, they go too far into the art. And it's abstract, and like, I don't even know what you're trying to say to me. Or I'm talking about patent pending, and all aloof, and who cares. So, how do you strike that balance and how do you create something that's fridge-worthy? As you'd say, artful and fridge worthy. But also, that connects and makes you say, I want to buy that underwear. Or, I want to buy that bidet. How do you do that?

Miki:

Yeah. Well so first, just to quickly unpack the word fridge-worthy, for those who don't know what that term means. Fridge-worthy simply means the idea that, you know when you walk into your home, and you go to your kitchen and you see your fridge? You go out, before, you go to grab a beer or whatever from your fridge. You see your fridge, and on your fridge are emblems of your life. You see pictures of your family members, of your eight children in your 10 person family.

Brett:

They take up the whole fridge, exactly.

Miki:

Yeah [inaudible 00:31:16] all over. You have invitations to weddings, you have little postcards from family members, you have little pictures of nieces and nephews. Or whatever it is, right?

Miki:

Hi, Stan.

Miki:

And my challenge to my team has always been, can you create something so beautiful, so artful and so personal, that it can make the small real estate on your fridge? That it can really make that small personal space on your fridge, that it can take up that space. That you can make something for TUSHY or THINX so beautiful, something so cool, that it can live in your home in some way. And so we design from that lens. And from that lens that, again, hits you personally and makes you feel something.

Brett:

It does cause you to shift and think differently. Now it's not just about, well, I'm going to choose blue. Like, you're thinking about everything differently.

Miki:

Yeah. Like, what is it that's going to make, how does it make me feel? And that's a different lens to creating.

Brett:

For sure.

Miki:

Yeah.

Brett:

So then, how do you blend fridge-worthy then with some true sales power, or some power to make people say, I want to buy this.

Miki:

So I always say to my team, in the art of it, I still need to know. I mean, it depends. Like you said, there's top of funnel stuff, where you want to create intrigue and mystery. And that kind of stuff is like, if you look at our TUSHY Bellagio spot that we just shot. I just shot this ad, where I finally figured out, where my friend is this genius rigging person. And he rigged 10 toilets with bidets on them, with our TUSHY Ace bidets on them. That we can play them like a piano.

Brett:

Like the Bellagio fountains?

Miki:

Bellagio fountain.

Brett:

I got to see that, then.

Miki:

I'll share, I'll text with you right after this. It's crazy. And so basically, it plays. So we made this like, (Beethoven's 5th). And just this wildly weird thing. And we don't show you very much about it, but it just says at the tagline at the end. Which makes you mysterious and makes you want to click and see what the hell this is. So there's that mystery and intrigue, which hooks you into wanting to know more.

Brett:

It's a curiosity play, yeah.

Miki:

Pure curiosity play, pure top funnel. Just stuffing people in. And then we spend the rest of the time, really converting them to the bottom, bringing them down the funnel. Educating them on the product, the value propositions and all of that. So that's the one strategy.

Miki:

The other strategy for top of funnel. I always think about prospecting. I always think about, how do you get people to both fall in love with our brand, with our ethos, with our playfulness, with our just [foreign language 00:33:56], with our love of life? They can feel it in this thing, but they're also understanding, what is the product? How does it work? Why do I need it? So it really answers those questions. And maybe like, why do I need it?

Miki:

Like, we just shot another commercial with the singing toilets, with the kind of the playing toilets. Where, it's this very Wes Anderson, weird thing. Where it's like, five people laying, they stick their heads in the toilets at once. And they're laying on these, which kind of represents the heated seat. And then all of a sudden, we start spraying. Like, I start kind of smushing ice cream on this guy's face. And then, this one woman takes a chocolate cake and squishes it in her white glove. And then she smacks it on the ass of white pants on this guy. So it kind of represents all taking a shit, basically, the chocolate looks like shit. And then the sprays go off, and then we get clean. And it's this debaucherous clean thing. And then we press the blow dryer, and then we're getting blow dried. So you're seeing the value, of how it works. Like, you're seeing, we press the remote, and then the nozzles go off and it starts spraying. It's clean. And then you press the dry, then it just blow dries it. So you see slow-mo, the hair blow dried. We walk out frame. So you're kind of, you're getting the idea of what this thing is. But you're still intrigued, tickled. You feel good vibes, you feel "very good vibes". You know?

Brett:

You're probably laughing. You're probably like, I can't believe I'm watching this. But it's also product demonstration in a really fun and creative and crazy way, which is super cool.

Miki:

Yes. And so, it's a lot of things. And I always look at, what are our best performing ads? Our best performing ads are the edutaining ones. Ones that are hilarious, and the ones that educate. Tells you, why you need it, how it works and how to use it.

Brett:

Yeah, totally makes sense.

Miki:

You know? But in a really simple, easy way. And so, yeah, it is an art and science, and they have to go hand in hand. And, creative and marketing always do sometimes have this natural tension, but I think it's a good tension if you have the right leadership.

Brett:

It's a healthy tension.

Miki:

A healthy tension, yeah.

Brett:

Love it. So one thing you talk about a lot, and I remember you showing these examples. That, you'll use actual statements from real customers. And you also talk about campfire stories, sharing campfires stories as a team or whatever, to kind of stir up creativity. So, can you talk about that a little bit? Like, how do you use customer statements in your ads? And then, what about campfire stories?

Miki:

Yeah. So, I always think like, our best advocates are our customers, our users, who love our products. It just, it makes so much sense. And so many times, companies are scared to, they don't want to bother their customers. But if customers love it, and you're asking them, hey, just fill in the blank. THINX is blank. Or, TUSHY.

Brett:

This is my favorite, yeah. Just fill in the blank. TUSHY is, fill in the blank.

Miki:

Fill in the blank. TUSHY is, blank. Just fill in the blank. And within 24 hours, we got 1000 responses. For things specifically, it was, THINX is Mary Poppins in my pants. THINX is strength, freedom and dignity for all women. TUSHY is...

Brett:

One of them was, eye candy butt bliss. I wrote it down. I got the thing.

Miki:

Yeah, eye candy butt bliss. It's like, TUSHY: you could eat off my butt hole. You know? And just like, my rusty starfish has never been so clean. Stuff like that, where it's crazy, hilarious, random.

Brett:

Especially when you know that it was a real customer that said it. It's like, okay, that's super fun. And I'm now totally entertained by reading this.

Miki:

Yeah, by real. And we always say, name of the customer, from a real pooping human. And so, we now use these campaigns, as actual campaigns and taglines for our company. Because our customers know what's best. And we don't have to oftentimes scratch our heads to ask ourselves, what creativity can we use? We can literally just reach out to our customer base, and they'll give us, and they're delighted in giving it to us. And if they see it in the world, they'll be like, oh my God, that's my line. And they now feel even more connected.

Brett:

And then they totally will put that on the fridge. They will totally put that piece, and share with everyone they know.

Miki:

And they'll share it with all their friends, tell everyone they know. And it engages people, attracts them. The same thing with PR. I talk about that a lot. Like, we do a ton of inbound marketing, inbound PR. And we've gone viral so many different times. And it's because, again, studying the psychology of people. Like, how do you create intrigue? How do you create mystery? Where, they want to complete the storyline. So often, people are like, send press releases, and hope that the press will write about them. But it just never works. It piles up on people's desks. Versus, you send these mysterious boxes where you have to assemble this thing. Or like, unscramble a riddle. So recently, we just launched our TUSHY Ace, part of our electric bidet seat with the most beautiful remote in the world.

Brett:

It's the heated seat, right? Which by the way, if you've never experienced a heated toilet seat, it is pretty magical, it really is.

Miki:

Heated seat, warm water, blow dries your butt. Best blow dryer on the market. It's not like where you have to still use toilet paper, because this is a nice strong blow dryer. And it looks an Apple product. It's the most gorgeous remote. Our design, it's just, it's the most beautiful product. And so, we were launching this. And our team, we were like, okay, we are going to create mystery around this product. And so, we put together these deck of cards. And these deck of cards that we made, we made actual TUSHY deck of cards, designed by hand, by my designers. And we had this instruction sheet for the press. And we said, pull out all the royal flushes.

Brett:

Nice. Royal flushes.

Miki:

[crosstalk 00:40:03] And so, they'd pull out the royal flushes. And they had to unscramble the royal flushes, based on the riddles that they were given. Like, for the diamond royal flushes, this is the riddle. And you had to unscramble it based on the different words. The letters that appeared on the 10, jack, queen, king, ace. There was a letter hidden, that then unscrambled based on the riddle. So then, it made the press have to work hard to actually unscramble and send the responses. And then once they get the TUSHY Ace product and install it, they're going to feel they've accomplished something. Like, they actually, they feel so much better.

Brett:

And they're so engaged, and you've delighted them.

Miki:

They're so engaged.

Brett:

You've just made their day in so many ways.

Miki:

Instead of just sending them a product, review it. You're almost like, dance monkey, dance. Versus like, let me bring you into this fun, mysterious story with us. And we're going to be surprised and delighted together. And we're going this extra mile for you, to make you just regale in the delight. And I think that, that is what people want in life. They want to be just surprised and delighted. They want to be regaled. And like, "Oh!". And giggle. They want their heart to flutter.

Brett:

They want magic, they want mystery, they want excitement, they want to be kind of caught up in something. Right? Not just reading.

Miki:

Who doesn't want to be caught up in this ,"oh', moment. And it feels so good and it just enlivens our being.

Brett:

So, how did that work out? How was the press' reaction to that?

Miki:

Well I mean, this one, we just sent them out actually last week, so we're still underway. But guess what? The fact that we had almost, I think it was like 20 press asked for these cards. Because first, we were like, we're going to send you a mysterious package. Are you willing to take it? We need your home address, because we're COVID times. And so we had, almost 20 press gave us their home addresses, to send them the mystery packages. And so that already means that they're hooked. And we did this before, for THINX. Where we had people go and smash bricks, and they had to open the bricks and look for these invitations. And 80 people showed up to our event, after they smashed the THINX. 80 press RSVPed. We had another event, where we poked a hold in eggs, and put these mystery scrolls in them. And then all 20 press showed up to our event, because they wanted to crack open the egg and look at the scroll. And we said, you can't open them until you come to the event.

Miki:

So it's just, creating the mystery, creating the intrigue. It's human nature that, when they start something, they want to finish it. They don't like incomplete story lines, they like to complete story lines. And when there's an incompletion, there's still this intrigue, this mystery that keeps you wanting more. And so, we're in that storyline right now, with the TUSHY Ace, and I'll let you know how it goes, but I feel very confident.

Brett:

Yeah. That idea of opening and closing loops. Once a loop is open, people want to close and they want to figure out. They want to solve the mystery. That's why cliffhangers work, and all of those things.

Miki:

And in relationship and romance. When you're romancing, you're seducing. It's the same kind of storyline. It's so much fun, that game.

Brett:

Yeah. And I know you've got to go, so I've got two quick things. But I also want to mention, just briefly. You talked about two stories, two events. Because you're the master of doing these just crazy, off the wall events, that also work. So, one was ButtCon, and one was the Funeral for a Tree, for TUSHY. Are those outlined in one of your books? Because even if nothing else...

Miki:

Not yet.

Brett:

They're not? Oh, dang it. Okay.

Miki:

Not yet, but my next, maybe. I might have a Do Cool Sh*t sequel, and talk about TUSHY in that.

Brett:

We'll highlight that, or I'll find the story, that I can put. Anyway, I'll let the audience [crosstalk 00:43:41].

Miki:

I'm happy to share them really quick. I can share them over the next couple minutes, no problem.

Brett:

Okay, just do it quickly over the next two minutes, yeah.

Miki:

Sure, yeah. So again, it's all about creating unorthodox events, unorthodox gatherings. That make people go, "Huh? What are you talking about? What is this?" So we held two kind of events before COVID happened. And we're going to now resume them once COVID's now finally, hopefully at bay. But one of them was called A Funeral for a Tree. And the other one was called ButtCon. The Funeral for a Tree is, we actually held a real funeral for a dead tree at the Judson Memorial Church, which is the biggest memorial church in all of New York City. In Washington square park. We had a 400 seat capacity, and we sold out. And we had a 25 part choir. We had Matthew Morrison, the actor, is one of our dear friends, playing the reverend. We had his wife, Renee, who is one of my best friends as well, who played Maple, the wife of the dead tree. It was just the most wild experience. And the people who came...

Brett:

People were reading eulogies. Which, I got to hear one. It was hilarious. Just super funny and well done.

Miki:

I mean, it was just comedy. It was sad, it was beautiful, it was inspiring. It was all of the above, and people left so inspired to save trees. [crosstalk 00:45:14] And to do it by buying TUSHY, by doing all kinds. You know? But it wasn't a marketing...

Brett:

It didn't feel like a sales pitch. It didn't feel a, "Hey, here's your coupon for TUSHY." As you walk out the doors.

Miki:

For one second. It didn't feel like. It just felt TUSHY opened my eyes to these important things. [crosstalk 00:45:31].

Brett:

We are killing a lot of trees because of toilet paper, and here's how we can help solve that.

Miki:

That's right. 50 million trees are cut down every single year because of toilet paper consumption. 30 million cases of urinary tract infections, hemorrhoids. All these health hygiene issues, not to mention planetary issues. All these things could be alleviated by just using a bidet, using TUSHY, under $100 product. You know? But we didn't even say any of that stuff at our Funeral for a Tree event. That was, we just put on this amazing event, brought to you by TUSHY. And people just were like, this was the most inspiring theatrical event I've ever been to.

Brett:

You get an insane press on it.

Miki:

[crosstalk 00:46:07] ...

‍

They said, "What are you doing?"

Miki:

What are you doing here?

Brett:

And the press you got from both those events, to pay for that kind of exposure would be almost impossible. But you got it because you did some crazy stuff.

Miki:

Yeah. It was truly, again, another reminder that just, what you put in. When you put in, like, if you build it, they will come. And you have to build spectacles. Again, things that surprise and delight. Things that make people go, I need to go and see what this is about. And that's the most important thing.

Brett:

I love that, I love it. So I know, you've got to go. So just kind of in closing. If people are listening to this and they're like, I need more Miki Agrawal in my life. And so, where can they, one, go to find your books? But also, just experience your marketing. Because hopefully, this has opened your eyes a little bit. Like, you need to pay attention to what Miki is doing from a marketing standpoint, you're going to learn a lot. So, how can people get more Miki in their life?

Miki:

Yes. Well first, you can also always come check me out on Instagram where I answer most people's questions pretty directly. Like, people have questions, I'm pretty good about responding. So Instagram, just @mikiagrawal. You can also go to mikiagrawal.com. If you subscribe to my mikiagrawal.com page, you'll actually get one disruptive move every week to do for yourself and for your business. So it's 52 disruptive moves. So that's just on mikiagrawal.com. And of course go to helloTUSHY.com. Check it out, get a TUSHY bidet. It's the best gift of all time. Holidays, it's the gift. It's just the best gift you can do for yourself. I mean, period, end of story. From a health high hygiene, confidence, feeling sexy, feeling good perspective. And then you can also, oh, if you want to learn about the strategies. I mean, definitely, Do Cool Sh*t, Disrupt-Her, check out my books. But then, if you want to actually learn about all of my tactics, of all of my strategy and building my companies from zero to $100 million plus, I built an actual course called Zero to a $100 million on Mindvalley.

Brett:

Mindvalley, I'll link to that in the show notes.

Miki:

If you go to my link in bio on my Instagram, I link to a free masterclass, a one hour masterclass which goes into a lot of these campaigns. But then, it also links to the quest, the Mindvalley quest, Zero to a $100 million. So, definitely check it.

Brett:

Beautiful. Got to check it out. I got to check that out. I got to watch that. And I'm going through Disrupt-Her right now. I absolutely love it, I highly recommend it. I like the audio version. I'm an auditory learner. And you narrate the books, so I get to listen to more Miki as I'm driving around. So that's been awesome as well. So Miki, this has been fantastic. Thank you so much for doing this. I've been inspired, and got some new ideas cooking around in my head. I know other people have too. So, really, really appreciate it.

Miki:

Yay. I was happy to be here.

Brett:

Awesome, thank you so much. And as always, thank you for tuning in. We'd love to hear from you. What do you think about the show? What do you want to hear more of? Less of? Let us know. And until next time, thank you for listening.

Brett:

Are you a D2C brand spending over six figures a month on paid media? If so, then listen up. My agency, OMG Commerce, and I have worked with some of the top eCommerce brands over the years. Including Boom, Native, Groove, Monan, Organifi and dozens more. And every year, we audit hundreds of Google, YouTube and Amazon ad accounts. And we always find either significant opportunities for growth, or wasted ad spend to cut, or both. For example, are you missing YouTube ads? Whatever you're spending on top of funnel Facebook, you should be able to spend 30 to 50% of that or more on YouTube, with similar returns. So if you're spending 300,000 to 400,000 a month on Facebook, you should be able to easily spend a 100,000 to 150,000 or more on YouTube. Visit omgcommerce.com to request a free strategy session, or visit our resource page and get some of our free guides loaded with some of best strategies for YouTube Ads, Google Shopping, Amazon DSP and more. Check it all out at omgcommerce.com.

‍

Nick Shackelford was a pro soccer player for the LA Galaxy turned online marketing super star. You’ve probably seen him featured in FOUNDR magazine or speaking on stage of the wildly successful event he co-founded - Geek Out. 

‍

I first met him when we both spoke at Ezra Firestone’s event in Denver several years ago and I’ve been a fan ever since. Nick is a master of media buying. He knows how to build agencies. And he has a really fresh take on creatives. We go deep into his creative process in this episode. Here’s a look at what we cover:

‍

• How a lack of diversity in your ads could be killing your results.
• Nick’s agency’s creative process. This is pure GOLD.
• How to use Amazon reviews to jump start your creative process - This strategy is so simple, so effective, you’ll kick yourself for not having used it.
• How a tool called Monkey Learn can help you key in on the right words and hooks to use with your audience.
• Why audience targeting is nearly dead and creative is KING.
• How Nick uses Creative Strategist and why you should consider one too.
• How to work with the algorithm rather than against it.

‍

Mentioned in This Episode:

‍

Nick Shackelford

   - LinkedIn

   - Twitter

Geek Out
   - Website

   - Events

Konstant Kreative‍

Structured Agency

Design Pickle‍

No Limit Creatives‍

Penji‍

Video Husky‍

Chubbies‍

Facebook Dynamic Creative‍

Josh Durham‍

Groove Life‍

Aligned Growth Management‍

Necklet‍

Monkey Learn Word Cloud‍

Luca + Danni‍

Northbeam‍

Triple Whale‍

James Van Elswyk

Transcript:

Brett:

Welcome to the Spicy Curry Podcast, where we explore hot takes in e-commerce and digital marketing. We feature some of the brightest guests with the spiciest perspectives on how to grow your business online.

Brett:

In this episode, we talk about the creative process that will supercharge your Facebook and Instagram ads. My guest is Nick Shackelford. You've probably seen Nick on stage at one of your favorite e-commerce events, or you've seen him featured in Foundr Magazine or in a host of other places online. More about Nick in just a minute. In this episode, we talk about the fact that audience marketing is nearly dead and why creative is almost all that matters. We talk about how Nick uses creative strategists and how you should consider using one too. We talk about how Nick use Amazon reviews to kickstart the creative process. This approach is so simple, so effective, so powerful, you'll kick yourself for not having used it before. We'll also talk about a tool that you can use to choose the right words and the right hooks for your ads. Plus, we'll unpack Nick's entire creative strategy. So lean in, buckle up, and please enjoy this interview with Nick Shackelford.

Brett:

The Spicy Curry Podcast is brought to you by OMG Commerce, attentive, One Click Upsell, Zipify Pages, and Payability.

Brett:

Well, I am absolutely geeking out about this episode and this guest. That was a little bit of a pun, you'll find out more about that in a minute. But, longtime friend of mine, absolute rockstar in the space. If you're paying attention to digital marketing at all, you've probably heard of this guy or seen this guy or you've heard the name. And so, today I'm absolutely thrilled to have Nick Shackelford, aka The Shack, on the podcast. And we're going to dive deep into really several things related to marketing. And if you've been listening to this season one of the Spicy Curry Podcast, we're really talking about three things, right? Have something good to say, say it well, say it often. Regardless of what changes in the online world, you've got to do those things. And so we're going to talk about what's working now, what's not working now, how to crush it like Shack does.

Brett:

And so a couple of interesting things about Shack for those that may not know, he was a professional soccer player for the LA Galaxy, and then decided, "You know what? I want my field to be online marketing rather than running around the soccer field." And so we actually met. We met at Ezra Firestones event, right, Shack? We both spoke at Ezra Firestone's event. I don't remember where that was or when that was. Was it maybe Denver, I don't know, three or four years ago?

Nick:

It was. It was Colorado.

Brett:

Yeah. Yeah. And I just remembered two things about you. One, you had an amazing strategy for influencer marketing on Facebook, two, you were rocking a killer hoodie, and three, you just had this swagger about you. And then as I've known you over the years, you always have a killer hoodie on. So what is the secret to getting great hoodies?

Nick:

Oh man, I actually am wearing one of them right now. This is an appropriate hoodie when you're just working at home 24/7. So this is [inaudible 00:03:41], which is another e-commerce brand that if you guys are in the space, they definitely do some interesting things. You should definitely talk to Davies. He's a smart, smart guy as well.

Brett:

Would love that intro, let's talk to him. You look like you're ready for a mountain expedition and/or you're ready just to chill at home and be super cozy.

Nick:

I like options, so the fact that I'm able to do both at a will is what I want to play with. But no, what you do, it's been fun to watch the growth of this, especially with the people that are doing it for a long time, because sticking with your theme of say it often, those that are usually saying it often are able to continue to be around because they've been preaching the same thing consistently. It might change a little bit, which trust me, I think 2022 so far, I mean, we're only 19 days into it. But yeah, there are a lot of things that have changed over the times, but we haven't stopped saying the same things, right?

Nick:

We talked about this at GeekOut. You came and you were like, "Hey, this is the consistent stuff that you have to do." And it's shocking... Maybe it isn't shocking, maybe it isn't. People forget what they have to continually do, and so reminding them over and over and over, they just might not be ready to hear it. So I always say, you always start with the basis so everybody's at the same page, but then you can get really to the nitty-gritty stuff, which you do so well, so I see you, brother, on this.

Brett:

Love it, man. Love it. So let's do this, we're going to dive into all the stuff you're doing right now on Facebook and Instagram and other platforms and what your creative genius is. And got an episode in season one here with Justin Brooke, my man, talking GDN, but I know I've seen him publicly say, "If you're not paying attention to Nick Shackelford, you're missing out, because Nick or The Shack knows what he's talking about." So tell me about GeekOut, or tell the audience. I know about GeekOut. I spoke at the last one in LA, and it was fantastic. I had so much fun, so much fun connecting with your group, with your audience. I could really nerd out or geek out. But tell me about that event and kind of what's ahead for this year.

Nick:

I absolutely will. Yeah, I was very fortunate you made it out there. GeekOut started five years ago now, and it started with the fact that I couldn't go to my partner and tell her, "Oh, babe, look at these campaigns. Oh my gosh, isn't this great?" Roll her eyes, she just didn't really care as much. And then [inaudible 00:06:04] James, he felt the same way. So we were geeking and nerding on all these things. We have a different vibe about ourselves, and what I mean... I literally have to explain this. We have the ability to deliver content and aggregate a room of people that want to learn, make money, and continue to build their business, but still feel open to talk about, "Hey, my employee just sued me," or "I'm going through this issue with my partner," or "I'm going...." these really intimate things that you don't feel comfortable expressing unless you're in a room that's safe and comfortable.

Nick:

And it just started happening organically, because I'm that way, right? I'm okay with things being very public. There's a couple things that I don't want to have super public, but I'm pretty much 99% out there on every channel because I do believe building in public builds relation, and there was no better way for us to do this except doing it in person. So this started, again, five years ago, and I remember we did it in Las Vegas literally on a couch. We thought we were renting a mansion, of course. Like all things in Vegas, you thought it was, and we figured what it really was. We got there, and I remember there was a putt-putt. One of the selling propositions on Airbnb was, "Oh, use our little putting green, and it was amazing." It was two holes, and I'm like, "Oh my God, what are we're going to do?"

Nick:

So we had a good run, but the thing that we never lacked was the quality of content. And so we've ran it back. We've done Tel Aviv. We've done Barcelona. We've done LA, Miami, New York, and we're gearing up for this year. We will be the only event that will do, I think, double digits of events this year. We're planning for 10. I think we'll probably, knock on wood because of where the world is currently at, get about six. And the first one starts in Dubai right before Affiliate World, and then we'll bring it back in for San Diego and Miami. Brett, I think I told you this before, it's the one business that I have that makes me the least amount of money but brings me the most amount of happiness, because you truly get a seed connection, and it's something that we've really, really gotten away from in the world for the various reasons that all of us are experiencing together, but it's just become way more important to me.

Brett:

Yeah, it was just phenomenal. I can't wait. I've been talking to my team about it. I've been bugging you for dates, because I'm blocking these out. I'm coming to speak at as many of these as I can or attend those that I can't speak at. It was just an amazing place to be, other like-minded, super smart marketers. I know you've had this experience. You were talking about talking to your partner. You can't really talk about ROAS. She doesn't care, right? I can't talk about ROAS to my wife. She glazes over. But you become acutely aware of how many acronyms we use in this space, right? ROAS, LTV, AOV, CLV. It's never ending, but this is your people. You can geek out about any of those things, but you can also talk about deeper stuff, people stuff, preparing for exits, buying companies. It's an awesome group, testament to you and to James, but just high level people, man. I would put it on the short list. If you could only attend a couple events this year, make sure one of them-

Nick:

[inaudible 00:09:22].

Brett:

... is GeekOut. I can edit this out later if I need to. Is there a rebrand coming too? Is it going to be GeekOut, is going to be something else? Or should we talk about that?

Nick:

Yeah, absolutely, we should. It's going to be called a GeekUp for two reasons. One, we have to level up, and so adding in that geek element is something that we still want to keep. And two, there was already a trademark called GeekOut Events. So as much of the branding I want you guys to be like, "Oh wow, that's so clever," I'm like, "Well, we kind of got into a situation."

Brett:

We're geeking out and leveling up. We're geeking up. This is amazing. Yeah, that's [inaudible 00:09:58]. Well, its going to be... I don't care what you call it, but GeekUp is super cool too. So if you attend only a few events, make sure one of them is GeekUp. And so I'll link to everything in the show notes. You can google it and check it out and stuff like that too. So fantastic, man. Any other notes on the event itself?

Nick:

Well, okay, so the segue into what I'm focused on a lot right now outside of the three businesses is we started GeekUp because it was about sharing and learning and getting that feedback of what's happening, and that led me to Konstant Kreative. We have almost our first year under our belts, and it's purely content because... Dude, you're a YouTube guy. You do good YouTubes. We don't do YouTubes, but we do a lot of Facebook, and we do a lot of Instagram, and we do a lot of TikTok, and we do a lot of Snapchat. And I used to be such a big teacher and proponent of strategies and hacks and tactics. I'll raise my hand here, I was one of the biggest people talking about various hacks and strategies 2017, '18, '19. 2020, I got a little quieter. 2020, I got real quiet. In 2022, I'm on that same quiet band because it just isn't as sustainable as it once was. I don't want to say we did this on purpose, but I like to think I did or had a feeling, my spider senses, for the new Marvel movie, which is fantastic, is tingling, and I was like, "Dude-

Brett:

That is a good movie. And actually, quick side note, the new, or new-ish, depending on when you're listening to this, Spiderman movie got us into the whole Marvel series. We watched Spiderman No Way Home, and then now we're going back to the beginning. We're, I think, three movies into the... It's like 30 movies. If you do chronologically through the Marvel series, it's nuts, but my family and I, we're going through it all, so it's super fun.

Nick:

Oh my God, I am not a movie person, but I will watch though. It's culture. It's so culture. Okay. What put us into this position was understanding that content was never going to leave us, and so we put so much time and effort into building. We weren't first to do it. There's Design Pickle. There's No Limit Creatives. There's Penjee! There's Video Husky. There's so many other people that do this content on demand thing, but we had to do it ourselves, because arguably, I've never gone through a pandemic. I'm 31 years old. I didn't know what would happen if I couldn't understand how much revenue was being driven by each one of our employees across our entire company because I didn't know what I needed to go potentially [inaudible 00:12:26] so I didn't know what loans I needed to go get.

Nick:

I needed to know that I could do a dollar earned or average per each one of our employees contributing to the bottom line. Sometimes in just an agency space or sometimes in business space, you have admins or project managers that might not directly tie to bottom line. We know they impact it, but we don't really know what they drive. Designers are another one. Editors are another one. Copywriters are another one. Unless you're in this performance tower, you know each email or each thing you write, you get dollars back on. If you aren't structured that way, you're like, "Dude, I don't really know how much money's coming in from these people." So we actually built this service and fed it to ourselves. And I think the term is dog feeding ourselves.

Brett:

Yeah, so this is a Google term. So it's called eating your own dog food. They borrowed it from Purina or Puppy Chow or something like that, where literally that company, they would eat their own dog food. It's a metaphor for using your own stuff, right?

Nick:

Okay.

Brett:

You believe in your product so much, you use it. Yeah.

Nick:

Oh, so thank you. I actually didn't know where that was coming from, and I'm glad you [inaudible 00:13:29]. We built it for ourselves because content... If you're like, "Nick, what are you about right now?" it's content, and it's volume of content at a cost effective rate. Listen, before the pandemic hit, a lot of people didn't really open up their mind to the quality of support, quality of company building that you can do offshore. I'm not saying outsource. This is a complete different thing. Outsource to offshore is completely different. Offshore are full-time your employees, your people, your values, your systems, your processes. Outsource is white labeling. You don't know what's going on. They're delivering you something, you're going to wrap in a bow, you're going to deliver. So I'm going to be very clear on that.

Nick:

This was something that when we started to understand quality of talent allowed us on the agency side to operate at 35, 40, 55% margin at times on various months, you can do the same exact thing on a content iteration, say. The only issue that a lot of people don't get right when they're like, "Hey, I need a performance editor," or "I need a performance creative person," it's because they themselves don't know what they want. Here's why. There's a subjectivity in this that everybody can't get away from in the romanticism toward a brand they own or towards the content that's being shot. I'm sure you experience this, or do you?

Brett:

Absolutely. Totally. Yeah, yeah. Sometimes we are our own biggest enemy, or often the brand owner is their biggest enemy in terms of getting creatives that work, creatives that actually connect and compel and move people to take action. Yeah, sometimes we're romantic about what we think that structure should be or what we think that message should be rather than focusing on... Let's not do something that's completely off brand, of course, but let's do what works. And sometimes you have the brand, or sometimes the agency gets in the way of that.

Nick:

It's so true because we're hired to do two things. Now, if you're hiring a branding agency or hiring a shop that needs to be really up here and be oh, really meta on things, God bless. I'm not in the space to where I can afford to create something that doesn't drive revenue. You're in the same boat. We have to validate the costs that we have for a lot of our partners. And so when you have this subjective idea of what happens, and I'll get into what testing, what we're doing now, what 2022, at least the bets that I'm making in this first quarter on how we're building out our testing and how we're building out our, at least our internal content structure. And actually, I'll fucking go into all the things, because I think the more that this information gets out there, it might actually spark some interest on your side, and you might have some interesting feedback for me too, so-

Brett:

Totally, totally. We're going to talk about one thing really quickly, and then I want to dive into the specifics.

Nick:

Okay.

Brett:

Actually, two things really quickly. What'd you say the name of the company was, the content company?

Nick:

Oh, Konstant Kreatives. Sorry.

Brett:

Konstant Kreatives. Awesome. We'll link to that in the show notes as well. But I could not agree with you more, right? I think in fact, back when we first met in Denver at Ezra's event, a lot of people were talking about hacks and here's little tricks and tips and things you can do to make Facebook and YouTube and all that work. And certainly, there's always going to be some hacks, but success is way more, way more about having great creatives, sticking to the fundamentals, and just being relentless, relentless on testing, relentless on looking for new angles, and then really just being consistent in what you're doing and doubling down on what's working. And so love that you're doing that. I got to learn more about your company there too so I can refer some people to you. But yeah, so let's dive in there. What is your process then for finding the right angle and getting that... Because you talk about volume of creatives too, right? You got to be testing pretty frequently, especially on Facebook. Not as much on YouTube, but especially on Facebook and Instagram. What's your process like?

Nick:

This is something that we think is an ongoing debate, kind of ongoing analysis. Let's think of it this way, you used to go to optimize campaigns at an ad level or an ad set level or even the structure of the campaign level, and we're having to do a lot of this before we even get to the campaign launch. What I mean by this is, before the conversation of cancel culture or before the conversation of inclusion really was being had, a lot of the ads that we saw were generally white males, white females across every brand, across every company, thin, thinnish, and you didn't really think about, "What if [crosstalk 00:17:49]

Brett:

Which is really just silly. But you're right, that's just the way it was. Yes, it was crazy.

Nick:

Yeah, it was silly. Listen, I'm not ignorant to who I am and what I am, but when you look at brands that are buying this, brands don't have this data. You can't run a quiz to be like, "Hey, what do you... " I guess you could, technically, but I don't know how it would come across us. "Who do you identify with? Or what do you identify as? Or what race are you?" You can't necessarily ask that, but that's the type of [inaudible 00:18:17] that you have to get done. Say, when we give a shoot or when we give content for others to see, "Hey, what do we need?" We usually recommend, "Hey, we need two different races and two different genders, and we need sizes of those genders to be appropriate to what we actually think is our customers buying."

Nick:

It's a great example, the Team Chubbies. Chubbies makes unbelievable male board shorts. I think they get an underwear too now, but makes male board shorts. And if you watch the progression over time of who was used in their content, fit male, white or black, fit male, white or black, little thicker, white or black, little dad bod, white or black, little larger, white or black. Do you know why? Because they're looking at all the-

Brett:

That's their audience, right? How many fit dudes are out there? Right? Most of us have dad bods. Not you, you're a former soccer player, but yeah, dad bods are everywhere.

Nick:

These are the frat guys that are buying it. And they literally... I've listened and watched the progression of this, and they're like... I'm sure that some people want to aspire to look great, but there's a point where you can get turned off by this, and you're like, "That's not really who I am." So it's this progression, this conversation of the testing begins at the inclusion of what's in the content. That's just a side note. I went on a tangent. I apologize there.

Brett:

Yeah, but I love it. I'll just, I'll key in on that. And so it's a side note, but it's important. A buddy of mine runs an athleisure business and they sell a lot of leggings. And so their models are very diverse, Latinos, African Americans, whites, every race, but also normal looking people, right? These are not all 98 pound supermodel. It looks like normal people, but they're joyful and they're smiling. And they are killing it because people look at it and say, "Well, that's me. That's my body type. That's my style." And it's so needed right now, so I'm really glad you brought that up.

Nick:

It's so true. And it kind of goes down to the typical structures that we run if I were to get a little technical in this. We still launch with dynamic creative. We still launch with... Dynamic creative is probably the first step. If we don't have a full hard belief, and this is the campaign structure, if we don't have a full hard belief in any one direction, whether it's like, we know this is worked in the past, but we're just trying to iterate on the value prop, or we're just trying to iterate on the USB, the box opening, we're just trying to iterate on a specific thing, we will still let Facebook choose or dictate the direction we need to go into up into-

Brett:

So by dynamic creatives, you just mean you're... Explain that for people that don't know the Facebook platform well.

Nick:

Thank you very much. So when launching a campaign, there's DCT, dynamic creative testing, which is a tool that you let Facebook choose. Essentially, you're going, "Hey, we don't want to impose any campaign restrictions to force spend," let's say on an automatic budget campaign, an ABO. You go, "I just need you to spend all my budget on these specific creatives that I, the media buyer, have told you I want you to spend on." And CBO can do that too with a little bit of limitations, but that's easiest communication I can give you on that. The dynamic creative testing [crosstalk 00:21:11]

Brett:

You're basically saying, "Hey, here's our creatives, and Facebook, you go wild and you find the winner."

Nick:

Exactly. We are not imposing a restriction on where money can be spent. We're letting the campaign dictate that. And that is... It's basically taking away the bias that we have of letting Facebook say, "Hey, we have this algorithm, we have this info, we have these consumers, and we're going to run this type of campaign on it."

Brett:

Yeah.

Nick:

Now I will have some of my media buyers look at me and go, "Chef, I won't always run this route," but that's the baseline that we start with, because if somebody has pushback on me, say, let's say David or Scott have a conversation, they're like, "Nick, I actually believe that's not the best use of this campaign, because we're only trying to compare two main concepts." And we'll say, Bernie says, "We'll use the athleisure brand here." We want to understand which color way of these leggings are going to be the one that hits or which price point of these leggings are going to hit. That doesn't need to be dynamic creative tested. That needs to be controlled and tested equally across the board. So that to me has probably been the biggest change. Before, I would launch all with minimum campaign budgets or some sort of structure where we're going audience testing, kind of put that after the fact, because it's not as impactful unless it's going to be purely based on the content or creative and the structure when you go live with it.

Brett:

Yeah. I love that. And so really, I mean, if you look at what is our job as advertisers, whether we're agencies or in house or solopreneur, whatever the case may be, our job is to make great creatives, but to feed the algorithm, to let the algorithm, whether that's Facebook, YouTube, or Google, let... The algorithm's smart. And in the long run, the algorithm's going to do a better job than you are in a lot of ways, so how can you feed it and give it enough creative so that it finds the winners? Or how can you do a very specific test? Like you were talking about, right? I'm testing two creatives, because I'm trying to find is it black or is it pink on the leggings that are going to hit, or is it this price or that price? That type of thing, a controlled test, but either way you're trying to say, "I don't know the answer here on what creative's really going to work, but we're going to find out." And then once we find out, then we're going to go all in on that, so-

Nick:

Because you and I both have these conversations with brands that talk about, "Hey, what's your brand book? What's your stance? What do you stand for? And they have the idea of who they want their customer to be, but it's not always what Facebook will agree to be or Google will agree for it to be. You have to let the replies come in. You have to let the data speak for itself. And I'm shocked. And I don't know if this is in your portfolio, we have about 116 brands right now, 117, I believe. The amount of post-purchase surveys on where you've heard from me or what information they're gathering is probably less than 15%.

Brett:

Totally, a very few of our clients are doing them. I think you've got to do it though, because you're going to be surprised by the answers you find out.

Nick:

Exactly, especially understanding touch points now the attribution is dropping a little bit, touch points and understanding where these people are coming from or how much I should be allocating per channel. We had a very, very intelligent brand, I'll say maybe 2020s, called Rove Concepts, which are a large... It's a larger retailer. It's a furniture, so purchase path takes a lot of time. You got to include your partner. A lot of it is generated interest on Facebook, but a lot of it is actualized on Google, XYZ. And these guys were making... This is the first company or brand that came to Jake myself and goes, "You know what? I understand that we gave you these [inaudible 00:24:37] a platform. I don't know if you guys are actually impacting the bottom line because it shows Google having way more conversions than you guys." I'm like, "Heck is going on?" I'm like, "Well, okay, I get it. I'm sure there's... It's an expensive piece. There's thousands of dollars. Can we just put surveys on the back of this? Or do you have this already live, or can you share this information?"

Nick:

A lot of what we started to see was, although that might not have popped up in the platform, a lot of it was saying I heard first about you on Facebook or Instagram, yet the conversion value, all the revenue was coming from Google. And I'm going, "You can't tell me to stop or that's going to be lowered." So we did a hard test turning off paid social, top of funnel. What do you know? Numbers dropped. Yeah, we wouldn't have been able to cover [crosstalk 00:25:22]

Brett:

Yeah, it's so true. I was just talking to a buddy of mine, Josh Durham, who used to be the head of growth at Groove Life and at an agency, and he talked about the same thing, doing those post purchase surveys and realizing that, man, 70, 80% of customers are going to say, "Hey, I first heard you on social, I first heard you on YouTube," or something like that. And I love Google, right? I'm a Google guy, but search and shopping sometimes takes the credit, especially branded search. You need to run it, but branded search often takes credit for a sale that, really, Facebook or YouTube generated, right?

Nick:

Sure. Preach to the choir [inaudible 00:25:59]

Brett:

Yeah, yeah. So, hey, I want to circle back to creative really quickly, and then we can talk attribution again in a minute, because there's some important notes there. As far as creatives go, what is your process? How are you guys coming up with hooks for the actual creatives, and what types of creatives are you launching with? I just want to give people ideas on what should they be testing next or how should they go about their creative process, or how should they talk to their agency to get them to do things more like you guys? Can you talk about your creative process a little bit?

Nick:

I can, yeah. We have one baseline process that we run with or usually use outside of if someone already gives us [inaudible 00:26:39]. Say a brand was coming to us and they already really had, "Hey, we know who our girl or guy is. Here's what we've learned outside of optimizing and looking at the current campaigns," we start with this process where we begin on Amazon, we begin with Reddit, and we begin with competitors. We don't go to the own brand stuff just yet, because we don't want any biases coming in from marketing messages that consumers might be regurgitating back. If you look at Amazon, there's very honest reviews at one star, two star, and even the three star, very honest reviews that use layman's terms that are common, that they're looking for solutions or points. And a lot of it on Amazon, actually, they don't really care about the brand itself. From the experience, from the information I have, they're not necessarily going to Amazon to find Lulu Lemon, they're going to Amazon to price shop. They're going to Amazon for the efficiency and the effectiveness of getting that product as quick as possible.

Nick:

You're not going there looking for a specific brand. You're usually typing in the product in which you need. Hydration packets, coats, clothing, that's the things that you're really searching for, so you usually get people that don't really about crap about who the brand is or what, and they're not going to hold back from you, because it's pretty anonymous at that point, or what have you. So what we started to find out is, before a brand would come to us and before they're like, "I don't know what talking points or hooks or explanations that need to be in this piece of creative," we go to the Amazon reviews. We probably export between 50 to a hundred. We drop it into a word cloud.

Brett:

So you're looking at the actual reviews from those customers or from competitors and from that category as a whole?

Nick:

Correct. Thank you very much to the clarification. We do not go to the brand own yet. We go from the competitors of the same exact product. So if I'm selling leggings, I'm going to the number one competitor with the most amount of reviews, similar in the legging side. I want to know why this product is winning. I want those five stars and four stars, isolate those by themselves. And I want those one stars and two stars, isolate them by themselves. I use three as a lever if I don't have clear messages of things to say or not say based on the four and fives, and the ones and twos.

Brett:

Got it.

Nick:

Four and five might be skewed.

Brett:

Right.

Nick:

One to twos might be skewed, but the threes might you my answer if I don't find it in the two buckets tracking with me.

Brett:

Totally. And this is brilliant by the way. I absolutely love it, yeah, because you're looking for real pain points, real motivators, real things that customers care about, and you're looking for their language, which just makes all the difference in the world.

Nick:

Because we are going to do market stuff. We're going to try and be cool and cute and playful. We'll do our best to not, but we sometimes fall into these categories. And I'll use one brand for this called Necklet. Necklet created a latch system that's magnetic that allows for stacks of jewelry to not get tangled. Brilliant. For women, or men, mainly for women that are wearing necklaces that don't want it to be tangled because they want to wear multiple, it's absolutely brilliant. It's genius. And the mechanism is a magnet on the back. What is it solving? Is a magnet strong enough? Is it latching? Does it pull your hair? These things are questions that the brand might not necessarily know. But guess who's going to know? The people that are buying it and the people that are leaving those reviews on Amazon. They [inaudible 00:29:51] will tell you exactly how feeling, whether this is a dumb concept or not.

Nick:

So we found out a lot of this. No matter how beautiful it might look, no matter how the feeling of joy might be portrayed, the mechanism is still the most unique value proposition for them, so we better go speak specifically towards. That, to me, was after we got from a competitors, put it into a word cloud. I think the easiest one you guys could use is probably Monkey Learn. It's called monkeylearn/wordcloud. I think you have to potentially set up an account. It's free, but if anybody else has a word cloud generator that is better than that, please hit me up. I'm always looking for more tools.

Brett:

Monkey Learn, and you're looking for... And this is like a word cloud builder?

Nick:

Yeah. So it's called Monkey Learn, and then it's a forward slash word-cloud or wordcloud. I'm not sure exactly on [inaudible 00:30:36], but I can pull it for you right after this. And that way, I'm able to aggregate all my star reviews. I would say it's easier if you... The more, the better. The more, the more accurate. Drop it into this word cloud, and it's going to generate and pull up the most commonly used words and tones. And that way, now here's your messages. Here's your information. Here's the things that you need to use. This, Brett, I'm telling you, this thing has allowed processes. Because if you don't know where to begin, that's where you go right away.

Brett:

Yeah, because if you don't have something like this, you're just going to begin with that discussion around the boardroom. It's going to be virtual, right? But you're talking to the client, you're talking to the brand owner, you're talking to the marketing director, and you're like, "Well, hey, our customer is this, and they believe this and they want that." And that's valuable, but this is amazing, where you're saying, "Okay, let's see what the people, the real customers are actually saying, and let's aggregate that. And let's look for tone and let's look for actual words." Yeah, just absolutely brilliant. I love it.

Nick:

The next step that we take from is... Say we already have this, say somebody already has this understanding, the next step that we have here is, where are you lacking? Where do you think your brand or your audience has not been addressed? This is usually right where we get in the conversation of inclusion, usually where we get in the conversation of, it seems like we're over indexed on a certain demographic, a certain gender, certain size. That, to me, is something that we really, really spend a great amount of time. We're very fortunate. We're in LA, so we have a melting pot of people to pull from, and that's something that we know, as a unique advantage, we have to leverage. So that generally is our second conversation that we have, of like, where can we do some tests to where we're not doing something that's not on brand, we're not doing something that we have fear of isolating a consumer, but we have the ability to actually get real learnings in a direction that we never ran before. Here's an example, Luca Danni, which is [inaudible 00:32:29]. It's a bangle and accessory company, bracelet.

Brett:

It's called Luke and Danni? Did I hear that right?

Nick:

Yeah. It technically reads Luca Danni, but Luke and Danni is what it is, and they sell bangles, they sell bracelets. Well, in this test, they usually always show the wrist, and it's the wrist of the woman buying it and the various women buying it. And they actually started seeing a little bit of a performance increase on the thicker in which the wrist began to [crosstalk 00:32:59]

Brett:

Interesting.

Nick:

And I'm like, why is this? Then you look at the export of the purchasing behavior of the people buying it. You have the strong representation of the Bible bell, strong representation of the south, strong representation of a little bit of the east coast. But you're like, "Wow, okay. I think some of our demographics are not the assumed thinner audience that we once believe there to be, so how do we mix this up?" So now we have wrists of all shapes and sizes. You hear me?

Brett:

Okay. Yeah, yeah, yeah. You're there. I thought I lost you for a minute. Yeah, so wrists of all shapes. This is so important. What's really interesting, I going to key in on something that Ezra Firestone mentioned to me a couple years ago, where they notice, BOOM!, their brand BOOM! and Cindy Joseph, it's really women over the age of 50, skin care, makeup, and really good stuff, but they found... They thought, "Well, what if we went a little bit younger with our models, or a little bit younger with our ambassadors that we have in the videos." And they started getting complaints. People were reaching out saying, "That's not me. This person is younger than me." Right? We sometimes forget that people really are looking for, "Can I see myself in this video? Can I see myself in this product. And is this for me?" And if it's not, then they're likely not going to buy, right? And so fascinating test, that, hey, thicker wrists, bigger wrists lead to better results. Diversifying your models leads to better results. You got to explore and got to test. That totally makes sense.

Nick:

Anybody can do this too. That's probably the biggest thing that I want to drive home, is those testing of using Amazon first and Reddit first because the natural communication, community already being built there within your competitors. It's not rocket... The way you present that information, the way you speak to it really will pull in on the expertise that you have, but this isn't rocket science, man. We have anywhere between 100 to 150 brands at any time. And if anybody's looking for analysis of their creative or performance or angles or whatever they're taking, they go this direction, because they know they can get it, they can get it quick, and they don't need to wait on other people to do it. So it's something I would definitely like to pass that forward.

Brett:

Yeah. Love it. What else? What do you see working on Facebook right now? And I know that this stuff has a tendency to be short lived, but in terms of length of videos, what are you finding that's working, or maybe, maybe there's different links, different angles for cold traffic versus remarketing? What are some of the kind of tips and ideas you're seeing there?

Nick:

Well, I'm going to caveat this [inaudible 00:35:25]. We are using two tools. So we're using North Beam and we're using Triple Whale, because we are making-

Brett:

Both fantastic tools.

Nick:

I completely agree. We have to make sure that we're looking at the correct amount of information or data and it's purely based upon a third party tool that's giving me the direction of, okay, this campaign, this ad set, this purchase path is making the most sense for us, so-

Brett:

Yeah. And just a quick note here, because I know the guys at North Beam and at Triple Whale, great platforms, but I'll talk North Beam for just a second. The way it works, it's basically first party data. So they put a first party pixel on your site, they put DNS record there where now they can have an infinity timeframe-

Nick:

Yes.

Brett:

... click attribution, right? So instead of attribution being only seven days, right? So after click happens, and after seven days, Facebook can no longer track it. With something like North Beam or Triple Whale, you track it forever, right? And you can go back and say, "Hey, this one YouTube click or this one Facebook click led to a customer who bought 20 times." Right? You can see all that data, because then these tools integrate with Facebook, Google-

Nick:

Yes.

Brett:

... Shopify, your email platform. They pull all that stuff together. So anyway, this isn't a commercial for those tools. We don't make anything from those tools, but you need that data to know what's really working and what's not.

Nick:

Well, we never used to have... We always needed this.

Brett:

We both needed it, yeah. And [crosstalk 00:36:42]

Nick:

We can get close without it. And now we can't. So now when I'm looking at campaigns, so I'm looking at what's working. Right now, let's go January 19th, 11:50 AM, Wednesday, 2022. What's working right now is images. I'm now getting images with plain background colors, bold colors. I'm saying yellow blues, pinks and purples, and big bold text. Call outs of the pain points of the consumer. And if I were to be more specific, this is primarily top of funnel, and we're having very minimal branded elements here, because all I'm trying to do is build engagement, build a little bit of direction that I'm trying to go in this place, it's just the right path for me to go down towards, and it is the quickest thing that can be launched. It is the easiest thing that can be made.

Brett:

Yeah.

Nick:

Pain points, value propositions, big, bold colored text, and maybe, if you really want to include it, what does the product look like? Is can just be a product on a white image or somewhere the left or right side of things. We're using this top of funnel aggressively for two reasons. One, if we can get the engagement, and if we can get some sort of understanding of people agreeing with it, or maybe it say other way, not agreeing with it, but that you're usually just seeing the comments, the shares or the engagement overall, I know I'm on the right path. I need to make an image or a more detailed image, shorter video or longer form video to run top of funnel. This is Facebook specifically. So our launching period right now is major callouts with the value propositions or with pain points that we believe for each brand with that color text to kind of pop off page. Second, if that is already being done or something that's already going down that path, we are going with 30 to 45 second videos.

Nick:

I was a huge proponent of sub 30, generally around 15 seconds, but I need this bigger audience for people to pull from, because things on platform, the pools of remarketing are not as quality as they once were because of the drop in reporting. So the more that we can have people engaging or watching the videos longer, I'm running all of our remarketing, or at least our reengagement middle of funnel, off of these audience and pools of creative that we're actually spending more time, that these consumers are spending more time on.

Brett:

Got it. So you're running... So yeah, I remember, and I'm not a Facebook guy, but I remember people talking about, "Hey, shorter creatives are working 15 seconds and things like that," which I'm sure is still the case to a certain degree. But what you're saying, and this totally makes a lot of sense, is 45 seconds, 30 seconds to 45 seconds to your cold traffic audiences, because then you can remarket to people that have watched half of that or all that or whatever the case may be, and now that's a much better audience than maybe the remarketing audiences you would get from someone who engages with a 15 second video. Did I understand that correctly?

Nick:

You did, because we need the... Well, for just a stronger audience. And I don't know what happened. I think the biggest thing that we've seen, if we're talking remarketing, the content, I'm not too sure. I wouldn't feel comfortable speaking about what's working across the board for our brands because it's very [inaudible 00:39:44] and very particular.

Brett:

Yeah, yeah.

Nick:

But one thing that is been a constant is, we need more periods of time. We used to be able to be very segmented, and like, "Cool. One to seven day, you're going to get this message. 8 to 14, you're going to get this message. 15 and on, you're going to get this. It's not working for us. We can't get... I hope it is for others because it was so incredible to push them down a purchase path, but we're going 30 days, 45 days, the largest pull in which we can get from, I think the largest pull is probably around 90, but the biggest pull that we can pull from, I want that to be my remarketing pull, and it's just a mixture of various engagement testimonials of videos of them reinforcing the product or the brand. That's the only thing that I know I can get some consistent benchmarks on, because other than this, there's just no consistency.

Brett:

Yeah. It makes a lot of sense. And as platforms are being more restricted on audiences they can build and how they track and how they report, I think in a lot of cases, we're just going to have to simplify, right? Some of the hyper segmentation of this seven day audience, 14 day audience, 30 day audience, some of that is going away. We're seeing that on Google too, actually, so I think that's probably pretty widespread at this point. Going simpler, going broader makes sense. How are you coming... Because I know, especially on Facebook, Facebook is hungry for new creatives, new concepts. How do you go about refreshing content so regularly and finding winning angles? Any insights there on process that you can share?

Nick:

So I don't have a... Ah, I got some stuff. So I don't have a firm one on this because it really is going to depend on budget. So I'll put a caveat there. The more money you have, the general amount of testing that you can do at higher volume. The only difference between a big budget and a little budget is that a big budget learns quicker, so it's no difference. The process is [crosstalk 00:41:37]

Brett:

You're doing the same things. It's just the speed at which you're doing them is what the budget really dictates.

Nick:

Exactly. Exactly. So I want to put, "Oh that's my brand is not spending 25,000, 50,000, whatever it is." I can't do that. You can, you just can't do as much or as quick. We did start the Konstant Kreative, why we built this is because we believe that there's an internal revision of content. There's an internal revision in planning of strategy for content. And then there's a marketing message. Generally, if it's evergreen, without talking about mother's day, father's day one-off moments, if the general process is happening, we are iterating on a seven day and a ten day window. Let me explain. Our current organization structure is, we operate in a pod system. So we have our copywriter, our senior media buyer, junior media buyer account manager, and channel specific buyers that we need to plug in.

Nick:

But the general makeup is admin, media buyers, strategist. We then started to build a new department, which is our creative strategist. Their core role is to analyze campaign performance on creative specifically. They don't care about the audience. They don't care about interests. Just the performance of the creative. Give that feedback into the client. Give that feedback into our creative director to shoot more content. And their job is to come up with the concepts of, "Here's why here's where I think the angles are going to be going towards." Now, it's various and different for all because the budget's going to be different for all, but it's usually out of two things. The increase of quality of life, that's one core concept, core understanding. Why is this product going to increase the value of my life or make my life better? Then, in the same flip side is, if I don't have this, how terrible or how poor or how unfortunate or how much struggle will my life have?

Nick:

So with those two deciding factors of how much I'm going to increase or how much I'm going to decrease, then we come into the concepts of positioning for each one of these products. So with that frame of mind, we have a seven day sprint to a ten day sprint of analysis, seven days to get the campaign running and live. First two, generally speaking, are not spending a tremendous amount of money, unless something works or unless we have... This is a commitment that the brand or us have [inaudible 00:43:48]. We are spending this money. We got to learn. I say 10 days because there's a little bit of updates attribution. You know, if you're running Facebook, data comes in very sporadically, so we want a little bit more time to run this. It's unfortunate because, at least for our team right now, gone are the days of launch a campaign on one day, slam budget on the second day, turn the campaign off on things that didn't work by the third day. That's more drawn out to a five day, seven day [crosstalk 00:44:14].

Brett:

Yeah. Totally.

Nick:

So if I sat there and go, the analysis that the creative strategy team needs to be doing is on that three day, five day, seven day, ten day window, because that's going to include a full week plus weekends and give you back on that Monday, because you're usually not going to get that launch data on that early, early day. To me, this is an ongoing iteration, it's an ongoing sequence of conversation with the brands, and I'm actually doing a pretty decent case study on what's happening on this. I'm going to unveil it live at Affiliate World, because we're working with Motion app-

Brett:

Nice.

Nick:

... which has some really good data on what's happening, where it's happening, and what insights that are having on their campaign, elements needed in creative. And then we have a large volume of assets on the constant side. So I'm trying to pull all the assets that we've seen perform before and all the assets that we've seen being requested, trying to pull a correlation between the two. And it should be some interesting stuff that we're going to find out, because a lot of this that people don't have, and I hate to hate to call it out, but they don't have a process of feedback loop. They don't have the understanding of when they need to go back and analyze and launch it. They can come up with great ideas, but how long does it take for them to make that test, or how long does it take for them to get information back to the people to create more?

Brett:

Just absolutely fantastic. So unfortunately, we're kind of running out of time, which is a bummer because I would like to continue to geek out or geek up here with you, but I want to kind of go high level for just a minute and just a few questions that I think will help anybody. And I think as people have been listening, hey, we got really technical, we got into some details, so pass this on to your media buyer. If you are a media buyer, I'm sure you're just salivating and loving every second of this. Let's talk high level, Nick. What should people be focusing more on in the coming year? And what should they be focusing less on? Meaning, kind of how are things shifting? What do we need to be really keying in on to get results? And maybe, what are some things that used to be important to pay attention to that now aren't?

Nick:

Great question. Fantastic questions. If you're media buyers or your agencies or your team is coming to you with audience insights or campaign structure insights, I would encourage them to let that go and encourage them to stop spending the time in finding structures and more spending the time on the research of what are these campaigns doing? What are the messages being said in the creative or content? And it has always been content first.

Brett:

All right, Spicy Curry listeners, here's the deal. Nick's audio cut out towards the end. Now, the good news is you heard 99% plus of what Nick had to say, but what you missed is kind of important. You missed how to get a hold of Nick. How can you follow him? How can you learn more about him? How can you get in touch with his agency? And so I'm going to tell you right now. The first thing is you have to follow Nick on Twitter. His Twitter game is an A plus. If you're in the DOC space, e-comm space at all, you got to follow him. And his handle is @iamshackelford. So letter I A-M Shackelford, so check that out. His agency is Structured. So structured.agency, check it out. They cut their teeth on paid social, but they also, Nick and Chase Dimond run an email marketing agency, so check out structured as well.

Brett:

And then one of my favorite events now. I think you should check it out. The events do get a little bit technical and nerdy, but GeekOut that Nick runs with James Van Elswyk, great event. So that's geekoutedu.com. So, check that out. You will not be disappointed. And as always, we want to hear from you. If you found this episode to be helpful, please share it with friends. Also, this is a brand new podcast, so go give it a rating on Apple iTunes, if you don't mind. It will make my day. It will allow other people to find the show. And with that, until next time, thank you for listening.

‍

Few people understand Facebook Advertising and Direct Response Marketing like Molly Pittman. You’ve probably seen Molly on stage at events like Traffic & Conversion Summit or Social Media Marketing World or you’ve seen her and Ezra Firestone create amazing content through Smart Marketer. In this episode we dive into a subject that is often glossed over - creating great offers and building acquisition funnels. Without a great offer, your ad efforts will fall short. And great offers aren’t just about discounting. 

‍

It’s the perfect subject to help you win in a privacy-first online world. 

‍

Here's what we cover:

• How Smart Marketer and BOOM are building and launching new acquisition funnels every month.
• How to test offers via email before investing in ad dollars.
• What metrics we should pay attention to in a post iOS 14 world.
• 3 ways to get more testimonials.
• What is likely to change in the future and what most likely won’t. 

‍
Mentioned in This Episode:

Molly Pittman

   - LinkedIn

   - Instagram

Smart Marketer‍

Smart Marketer Podcast‍

Ezra Firestone‍

Traffic & Conversion Summit‍

John Grimshaw‍

BOOM! by Cindy Joseph‍

“5 Makeup Tips For Older Women”‍

“The State Of Paid Ads In 2022”‍

“Big Magic” by Elizabeth Gilbert

“Good to Great” by Jim Collins‍

“Turning the Flywheel” by Jim Collins

Transcript:

Brett:

Welcome to the Spicy Curry podcast, where we explore hot takes in e-commerce and digital marketing. We feature some of the brightest minds, some of the spiciest perspectives on how to grow your business online.

Brett:

Season one of this podcast is built on the old business adage that all it takes is three things to grow. One, have something good to say. Two, say it well. And three, say it often. My guest today is Molly Pittman. She's the CEO of Smart Marketer in partnership with Ezra Firestone. We're talking about crafting irresistible offers and building acquisition funnels for e-commerce.

Brett:

So, lean in, buckle up, and enjoy this episode with Molly Pittman.

Brett:

The Spicy Curry podcast is brought to you by OMG Commerce, Attentive, OneClickUpsell, Zipify Pages, and Payability.

Brett:

My guest today really needs no introduction, but I'll give a quick introduction just in case. Today, we're talking about a variety of things. We're going to talk about getting the right offers, and we're going to talk about acquisition funnels. We're going to talk about getting the right mindset as a market, as a media buyer, and as an advertiser.

Brett:

I have the one, the only, Molly Pittman joining me on the show today. Really, if you haven't had the privilege of hearing Molly Pittman, well we're about to fix that, but you've missed out. Molly is a legend, debuted at Trafficking Conversion Summit. It's been years and years ago now, I don't even know how many years. But just blew up and everyone was like, "Man, Molly Pittman is the best," and she is.

Brett:

Now she's partnered with my buddy, Ezra Firestone. Molly is the CEO of Smart Marketer, and I get to observe what she's doing there, what the team is doing there, and they're cranking out amazing content, amazing training that I get to be a part of at some level, which is super fun for me. We're going to dive into what's working now and a variety of other things.

Brett:

Molly Pittman, welcome to the show, and thanks for taking the time.

Molly:

Hey, let's do it. What's up, Brett Curry?

Brett:

What's up? What's up?

Molly:

I'm so happy to be here. I'm so happy to be here. Hello to all of you listers. You're listening to an awesome podcast, huh? When Brett reached out to do this, I was like, "Hey, it's about time." I know you've had podcasts in the past, but excited to hear you more regularly. Yes, love working with you Brett, from the agency side of things, the faculty side of things at Smart Marketer. All of our students love everything you have to share. So, thank you for having me.

Brett:

We get to collaborate on some content. Any time I can go somewhere and hang out with you, John Grimshaw, and Ezra Firestone, I am saying yes to that. Anytime I can make it happen, I'm doing that, because you guys are awesome. [crosstalk 00:03:14].

Molly:

I don't know how much work we get done, but we have a lot of fun.

Brett:

A decent amount of work.

Molly:

I'm kidding.

Brett:

Totally. When we get together, like the last time we all met at Ezra's house, Ezra just cooked some really fancy, simple... He went into full-on chef mode for everybody, and it was pretty amazing.

Molly:

Hey, Ezra is the servant leader. I think we were there-

Brett:

He really is.

Molly:

... hosting a live workshop, and Ezra was like, "Hey, my job right now is to cook and make sure you all are fed." Good example of leadership right there.

Brett:

[crosstalk 00:03:49] make some lattes, or pour some espresso shots. He had this amazing espresso machine-

Molly:

"What do you need? I got it."

Brett:

Yeah. The funny thing is, I'm like, "So Ezra, are you going to drink some espresso?" He was like, "No, I gave that up." He quit. All right, so you're just making for everybody else.

Molly:

That is something that I love about what we're doing at Smart Marketer, is its different from any culture I've ever been a part of, even if it's a day of consulting inside of a business where we really do have fun first. We get our stuff done. We meet our goals. We serve the world. I think that that fun part is what a lot of people are missing out on. It is okay to have fun, and it actually makes the rest of it way more enjoyable and profitable.

Brett:

It's stress relief. It allows you get the right mindset, like fosters creativity when you're having fun and enjoying what you do, and enjoying who you're doing it with. Yeah, you guys do such a good job with that, and Ezra kind of drives that forward where it's like to serve to the world unselfishly and profit that mantra is true. It's not just something that sounds good, or sort of feels good, or looks good on a shirt. It's the way you guys live and the way you guys operate.

Brett:

I think it's part of the reason why we get along so well. We're huge advocates of culture, and putting people first, but also letting people shine and be themselves. You should enjoy working with one another. It makes a difference.

Molly:

Have more fun, y'all.

Brett:

And have more fun.

Molly:

It also allows a lot more longevity in this business. This year, I've been doing this 10 years, which isn't as long as a lot of you, Brett, or people like Ezra, but it's still a decade.

Brett:

Wait a minute. That sounded a veiled "old person" comment there.

Molly:

Well no, I just know your story.

Brett:

It's all good.

Molly:

You have seniority.

Brett:

A little bit. A little bit, yeah. In Internet years, a decade is forever. Yeah, I started like 2004, so I'm definitely the old dude when it comes to all that.

Molly:

Yeah, but you know a lot of my story where I had the opportunity to intern, and then become the VP of Marketing at Digital Marketer, and had an awesome time at that company. But man, I was grinding then. A lot of times, I felt like crap. To be in a situation where I still get to serve the market, still get to teach, still get to be in this business, but feel really good about it, the best part of it is I know I can do it for so much longer now.

Brett:

Yeah. Yeah.

Molly:

It's a long game. It's not a short game, y'all.

Brett:

I'm really glad we brought this up. It was not planned. That feel good, have fun, and it will bring out the best part of you when you work as well. You'll be able to produce better when you're doing those things.

Brett:

Let's dive in, Molly Pittman. We've got a lot of ground to cover. We're going to talk mindset. We're going to talk tactics. We're going to talk strategy. I also want to talk about your dog rescue. We'll get to that in a little bit. Let's talk about offers for a minute. Those that have been listening, and hopefully you're listening to every episode in season one of this podcast, we're talking about something good to say, saying it well, saying it often.

Brett:

One of the things you and I were chatting about, and I love this, is that you're really focusing on your offers right now, and what offers are working, and what offers are not working. It really digs into that saying things well, and also saying them often. Talk to me a little bit about... We have two angles we're going to look at. We've got Boom on the e-commerce side, Smart Marketer which is kind of on the info training side, but what offers are working right now?

Molly:

Yeah, great question. First, I want to talk about what an offer is. I realized during our Mastermind call last week that people use this word to describe a lot of different things. That causes confusion in itself. There are a few different ways to talk about an offer. Really, what I'm talking about today are acquisition offers. Essentially, what vehicles are we using to start a conversation with someone who's never heard of our brand before, and turn them into a buyer?

Molly:

A lot of times, that means a lead magnet, or a pre-sale article, or some sort of coupon. It definitely depends on the business and where you are currently. The more, especially post-iOS 14 with all the crazy stuff happening in paid media right now, the more that you can focus on your offers, the better that everything is going to go. I mean that in a few ways. Number one, putting more time into offer creation. I would say in both businesses, other than making sure our products, the things people are buying, are good. Other than that, I would say offer creation is where we spend most of our time, at least at the C level.

Molly:

When it comes to marketing strategy, offer creation is where we spend most of our time. Sometimes, we'll release an offer that John, Ezra and I have maybe spent 15 hours discussing. It looks like an opt-in page that took 30 minutes to write, but so much time and effort went into the psychology of what it is, and the delivery of what it is, and how it sets us up to sell. It's really, really spending time here. As the CEO, I'd be like this is one of my still most important duties every single day.

Molly:

The second part of it is thinking about the way you deliver it. People miss out on this part of offer creation because what we don't realize is that someone might be interested in solving a particular problem, or they might be interested in a particular topic. But they may not be interested in the way you're delivering it. Let's take Boom for example, a pre-sale article that Ezra has been using for over five years, that's the best acquisition offer ever created for that business is five makeup tips for older women. Simple pre-sale article, we optimize for purchases, there are different products on the page. It's an amazing, amazing pre-sale article.

Molly:

Well guess what? It also works really well as a lead magnet. A way we've been able to scale that business is to take that pre-sale article, turn it into a simple PDF, and put it behind an opt-in wall. There are some people that would rather give their email in exchange for an asset, and see that as higher value. There are some people that would rather read an article. So, this isn't just about the creation of new offers, but also the repackaging of assets that you already have to deliver them in a way that's going to reach more of the market that you're trying to reach based off of how they like to consume information.

Molly:

It's why videos and still images are equally as important on a paid traffic platform, because there are some people that like people. There are some people that react images. It's important to keep both of those in mind.

Brett:

I love that. So, what is the offer, and really crafting it and thinking about how do we make this offer irresistible, how do we craft this article so that someone says, "I have to have that. One, that designed just for me. Two, that's solving a real problem or it's meeting a real need. Three, I got to have it right now." [crosstalk 00:11:29] those things. Then also, how you actually deliver it.

Brett:

I want to break that down just a little bit. You had mentioned that sometimes you, John, and Ezra spend 15 hours crafting an offer where it looks like just a simple page, but you're really thinking about this. This goes way beyond the, "Oh, should we do a 10% discount? Or a 15% discount?" That's what I want to talk about here.

Molly:

Yes, but it's also different. What I would see, I would say, in 90% of students, is they spend those 15 hours on the ad, and "Oh, the offer, I'm just going to throw a page up there." It's like, no if you have to choose, it should actually be the other way around.

Brett:

The offer, yeah. Yeah, it totally makes sense. Walk us through a little bit. What is your process as you're thinking about crafting an offer? What questions are you asking? What are you thinking about? What do you want to have in front of you as you're building that irresistible offer?

Molly:

Of course. The first question is, what do we need? What need is there in the business that we are solving with this offer? So, the need might be "It's Q4 and we want to monetize, we need a sale, we need a promotion." Or the need might be, "Hey, we need more of an evergreen acquisition offer-"

Brett:

[crosstalk 00:12:48] need as business [crosstalk 00:12:49].

Molly:

As a business, exactly.

Brett:

Yep.

Molly:

So, is it more promotional? Monetization? Or do we need something more acquisition that's evergreen that's going to continue to bring new customers in? It always starts with what does the business need right now? We try to create one of these in each business once a month we're creating a new offer. A lot of times, we're using other offers that we've created in the past, but we try to create one new offer every single month. It first starts with "What do we need? What does the business need right now?"

Brett:

Awesome. Then what comes next? You understand "This is what we need. We need something evergreen. We need a quick hit in this area. This is what need as a business." What do you look at next?

Molly:

What are we going to sell? What is the true end goal of this offer? Maybe the end goal is for Smart Marketer, we're going to sell our Smart Paid Traffic course, and we want to do that on an evergreen basis. We always work backwards with offers. If you don't, you're going to end up with a funnel that doesn't really make a lot of sense, that might have a really attractive front end offer, but doesn't transition to the sale, which is the opposite of what we're looking for.

Brett:

Yeah, totally, totally makes sense.

Molly:

Then we pick-

Brett:

[crosstalk 00:14:10]. Yeah, please keep going.

Molly:

Oh, sorry. Go ahead. Then we pick the medium, so what medium do we feel is best suited for this particular scenario? That definitely comes down to business type. It comes down to what's already working in our business, what can we do more of, also what can we do that's different from what we've done in the past because maybe we have four or five evergreen acquisition offers running in our ad account. To add another, we either need to go after a different audience or we need to have a very different offer type that isn't going to compete with what we're currently doing.

Brett:

Yeah. Yeah, I love that. Let's look at some examples here related to Boom that I think will help people a lot. You guys are working on an acquisition funnel every month, and that acquisition funnel I would assume, starts with an offer. Is that where that begins?

Molly:

Absolutely. Absolutely.

Brett:

What does that look like? Can you talk about any examples there for Boom?

Molly:

A great example of this is going back to "Five Makeup Tips for Older Women", the pre-sale article. We know that that works, so we know that this audience wants makeup tips, or they want to have discussions around makeup. What is something similar but different that we could do? Last year, we launched a lead magnet. We switched the delivery. It's not a pre-sale article. It's something you're opting in for. We're collecting the email address, and then going for the sale.

Molly:

So, using what we know works, but changing the conversation a little bit. Instead of five makeup tips, it was, or is, a 10 Minute Makeup Guide. So, still speaking to makeup, but now speaking to women who are less maybe concerned about the tips, but are more interested in the fact, "Holy crap, this only takes 10 minutes." That's an awesome speed and automation hook. That would be a good example of saying-

Brett:

[crosstalk 00:16:16] how to take care of your makeup, or how to do your morning makeup routine in 10 minutes or something like that, that's kind of the angle or the thought?

Molly:

Exactly. That came from a need of we have scaled the current evergreen acquisition offers as much as we can across our paid traffic sources. We need something new to talk about. We need to be able to walk into the party and have a similar, but different, discussion. Okay, let's change the topic and let's change the vehicle in how we deliver it.

Brett:

Yeah, that's awesome. The five makeup tips, and yeah we've had the privilege of running that on YouTube for four years or five years or something, and it still works. The five makeup tips is great. It does appeal to the curiosity. People are like, "Okay, well I would like makeup tips. I'm over 50," and I should not, by the way we were talking old jokes, I'm not over 50, and I'm not a woman either, so you're thinking "I want to know what these tips are," so there's a little bit of curiosity and there's also some benefit there that you want to get, which is cool.

Brett:

But this 10 Minute Makeup Guide, that's speaking to someone who says... It really resonates well with that over 50 powerful women audience that Boom is after, is they're like, "I don't have time for makeup, and I don't want to take the time. 30 minutes getting ready for the day, no way." How did you guys land on that? Was that something that you heard consistent feedback from customers? Is there something you guys started to pick up on, because you know the customer? Where did that come from?

Molly:

In both businesses, these ideas usually come from the customer, or feedback to anything that we're doing from an organic standpoint. In our businesses, that's the benefit of social media. It's not that we're going for all this organic traffic, which is nice, but not always sustainable. We use social media as a way to test different conversations with the audience. Usually, this starts, for Smart Marketer, as a blog post, for example, and Boom, too.

Molly:

Last year, we've released a blog post about our "Love Demo Love Formula" which is a formula we teach to [crosstalk 00:18:23]-

Brett:

Formerly known as "The Testimonial Sandwich", so there was the artist formerly as "Testimonial Sandwich", that "Love Demo Love". Feels better.

Molly:

It's a formula, a template that we teach for ad creatives. We see that that does really well on the blog. The email has high open rates. People are spending a lot of time on that page. They're clicking on whatever call to action is within that blog post. Wow, this is something our audience is interested in. Can we turn this into some sort of acquisition offer? Sometimes, it also comes-

Brett:

Yeah, [crosstalk 00:18:54] clarify, just so people understand because you may be lost like, "What are you talking about? Love Demo Love, and with Testimony? What the heck?" It's Ezra's tried and true ad formula of starting with a testimonial, a real user-generated content testimonial, or maybe a couple, like one to three, product demonstration in the middle, product video demonstration in the middle of the video, and then you close with more testimonials or more love. So, "Love Demo Love", and also what used to be called the "Testimonial Sandwich".

Brett:

So, anyway, I just wanted to clarify for those that are like, "What are you talking about?" All right, go ahead.

Molly:

A lot of times, it comes from conversations with the audience, a response from the audience. Then sometimes, it comes just random inspiration. For Smart Marketer, an offer we're working on right now that's going to happen soon is the "State of Paid Advertising in 2022", which is a free four hour workshop. It will show an analysis we did of over $60 million in ad spend. That just came from a random idea I had in the shower, what would this audience be interested in, how can I help set them up for 2022? It's not always coming from the customer. Sometimes it's just a random idea that comes in when you give it space.

Molly:

Usually, it is coming from something that already exists, or that we see from competition, or other people out in the market.

Brett:

Just an interesting side note, are you an idea in the shower person? Is that where your ideas come from? I'd just be curious to know where do your good ideas come from? What's the space where disproportionately you have good ideas coming from that space?

Molly:

It's really whenever I give it space. That's the key. It's usually, in today's world where things are so busy, forced space, time away from my phone, which is the shower, which is driving in the car, or hiking. If you guys are interested in this topic, read "Big Magic" by Elizabeth Gilbert. It's one of my favorite books. I read it in 2015 or '16, but she basically explains how this works, like how does creativity actually work and how can you set yourself up to be more open to cool ideas? The cool ideas are out there. Most of us are just too shut off, too busy, too addicted to what we're doing to allow the ideas to actually come in. So yes, any time you give it-

Brett:

What was the name of that book again?

Molly:

"Big Magic".

Brett:

"Big Magic". Love that. I'm going to check that out. Just a quick note here, because I've always found this fascinating, I have zero good ideas in the shower. I really don't know that I've ever had one positive, useful, meaningful idea from the shower other than "Hey babe, we're out of shampoo." That's all I think about in the shower. However, for me, two places that I get disproportionately high amount of good ideas, one is if in the morning if I get up when it's still quiet, and I have eight kids so it needs to be early in the morning when it's quiet, but if I feel like I'm ahead of the game, if I feel like there's nothing that I have to do right that second and I can just kind of sit in the quiet, good ideas come from there.

Brett:

The other place, and this is an odd one, but on airplanes. I sit on an airplane. They shut that door. I never pay for WiFi, I just don't want to. Some of the ideas that have shaped OMG, that have shaped the agency, came from me sitting on an airplane. I don't know why. That's my shower time. I even said a few times, I'm like I should just go fly somewhere and then fly right back, and I'm going to get great ideas.

Molly:

A lot of people do that. I have a friend who took a flight to Hong Kong and back, and never even stepped into the city just to write a book. The reason for that Brett, those are different forms of meditation. It's the same thing. It's essentially cutting off stimulation that is-

Brett:

Right, there's nothing else.

Molly:

... keeping your brain busy so that your mind and your soul can be quiet, so that these ideas can really formulate. That's the key.

Brett:

I love that. I love the fact that I'm not the only one that loves... I don't even like sitting on airplanes, but I get the best ideas. Anyway, cool. That's awesome. Cool, so thank you for chasing down that rabbit trail. I think that's so useful. Where were we though?

Molly:

We were talking about offers that are working right now, and I was chatting about the 10 Minute Makeup Guide, the workshop we're doing for Smart Marketer, and just saying that lot of the ideas comes from what you guys say, what we see as a need out in the market. A lot of them are random, unique, creative ideas, which are fun too.

Brett:

So, really fostering both, so you kind of need a vehicle or a mechanism to collect that feedback from customers, and then you need to create space for yourself to have these good ideas, and then bring it together with your executive team to get the idea when you're relaxing or whatever, and then you bring it to the rest of the executive team and you hammer that out. It may be 15 hours, but at the end of that time you've got a killer offer that you can really use to grow the business.

Molly:

Yeah, Brett, and some other steps that I didn't mention there, just to sort of round out the actual tactical, how do we get it out the door. Once we have the idea and we feel good about the offer, we feel good about its ability to do what we need it to do in the business, then we go into action mode actually creating this thing. That usually looks like a brainstorm call with our copy team where we discuss what is this, and how is it going to be presented?

Molly:

We talk about the big hooks, what are the big selling points of this offer, what problems does this offer actually solve? Of course, how do we want this to be delivered? Is it a PDF? Is it a pre-sale article? Is it a simple opt-in page where we're giving a coupon, like you said? How will this be delivered. Then they're able to go and make it sound good, not only the page in which we're selling the thing, but also the delivery of the thing. Then of course, that's passed off to design, it's passed off to our ads team and everything starts to get into motion.

Brett:

It's so good to get copy involved early, because that's such an important part of everything else. You have to be able to really strike that cord and make people want it, and copy is such a huge part of that. I love that you do that fairly early on.

Molly:

Yeah, and it's not just writing the copy that is the offer. It's also the selling of the offer. Even if it's a free thing, you're still selling someone on the idea.

Brett:

Totally. Totally, yeah.

Molly:

Every new acquisition funnel is first tested through an email promotion to the list, because we don't want to go out and buy-

Brett:

Okay, so you build the product, you test the email, email to the list first.

Molly:

Yeah. Of course, it's always going to convert better to your list than it will to paid traffic. We want to test it to the list first before we start to buy ads, mainly because we want to see of course, what's the conversion rate on this thing if it's free, and does this actually generate sales? We can create offers all day, but if it's not meeting the need of the business, then it's not going to work. It's first tested to email. That also gets some good traction going on your pixel so that Facebook and Google can start to see what types of people are taking action on this page, get some momentum.

Molly:

Then we stop for a second. We look at heat maps. We look at conversion rate. We look at the performance from a data standpoint. We make any optimizations that we might need to make, and then it's ready to go to you and your team, and hand over to our media buyer for paid ads.

Brett:

I love that. I love that. So, you're testing to the email list first to understand does this convert. And hey, if it doesn't convert to your list, it's not going to convert to cold traffic.

Molly:

Exactly.

Brett:

So, does it convert, and at what level, and kind of understanding that a little bit. Then you're going to run some ads and start getting conversions, trying to pixel, finding out what's what. You pause that. You then look at heat maps, make some tweaks/optimizations to the funnel itself. Then you go ham on the advertising at that point.

Molly:

Then it's hopefully ready for scale. Probably half of these that we create don't work still to this day. That's okay. We say, "Let's put it on hold for a second." It's never that this just doesn't work, and we're not going to use it ever again. It's "Hey, let's put this to the side and try to figure out why it didn't work, and maybe we can use it later." There are a lot of times that we just can't get it to work, and that's okay.

Brett:

Right. Really, you guys are the best. You're the best in the world at some of this stuff. If you've got a 50% success rate, what's everybody else going to have? That's likely to be 50% or maybe less even. What's interesting, we just walked through that four step process you guys go through, most people it's like think for five minutes about an offer, maybe it's more than that, but think about an offer and then "All right cool, let's throw a bunch of media behind it to see how it does," where you guys are testing with your audience or email list, you're running some small tests and ads, you're getting data, you're optimizing and then you're going big. I love that so much.

Brett:

It kind of goes back to one of my favorite business principles that comes from Jim Collins, the author of "Good to Great", and a book called "Turning the Flywheel". He's an awesome... I'm sure everybody's heard of him. He talks about this concept of firing bullets and then cannonballs. He used kind of this old warship analogy. The idea is fire bullets to make sure you got something that works, and then fire a cannonball rather than a lot of people fire a cannonball and they use up all their gunpowder, and all they've got available, and they're like, "Well now I've got nothing."

Brett:

So, test small and then go big.

Molly:

Also, understanding that these offers are not channel-specific. A lot of people create an offer, which they don't spend a lot of time on. They set up a Facebook campaign. They run it for a few days, and then scrap it all. "Oh, this offer doesn't work, and Facebook ads don't work." It's like guys, no it's so much deeper than that.

Brett:

Totally. Totally. Your kind of creating these acquisition funnels then for Boom, and spoiler alert, Boom is going to be releasing new products this year, which is great. Your kind of creating one of these acquisition funnels for each product. That was another thing too with Boom, and Ezra talks about this a lot, that it was just the Boom stick trio, or just the boom stick, that's all that you really use for cold traffic. Now you're building these acquisition funnels for other products, which is huge, and which is going to be a game changer.

Molly:

Look, honestly acquisition funnels are way easier for e-commerce than info or services.

Brett:

They are. They are. No doubt.

Molly:

Info and services takes way more of relationship buildup before someone purchases. It's mainly lead generation through a workshop, or a webinar, or a lead magnet, or a challenge, or a mini series, or whatever the hell people are doing today to try to convert someone into a customer or client. It's a little bit of a different ballgame than e-commerce. A lot of the plays with e-comm can be easier. A lot of the offers that Boom runs are simple. It's direct to a product page for a lip gloss, direct to a product page for a mascara, direct to something that's a direct sale essentially. Where with info, we've got to dance around it a little bit more. The offer creation is even more intensive for that business type.

Brett:

Yeah, it is.

Molly:

Like me. Good lesson, what Ezra has been able to do with Boom I think after working with us at Smart Marketer, is realize that there is a huge hole in the e-commerce space for offer creation that isn't just a giveaway, that isn't just direct to product page, that isn't just a coupon. That is a big reason Boom is able to excel, because we do understand pre-sale articles. We do understand lead magnets.

Molly:

Boom is even doing webinars. They're called "Ladies Night". These principles work for both business types, and there's actually a much bigger opportunity in e-commerce to get more creative with your offers because other e-commerce businesses are simply lazy or don't know how to go about it.

Brett:

You nailed it a little bit ago when you said that in a lot of ways offers for e-commerce, it's simpler. It's more straightforward than it is to do info products. Info products, you really got to get to the core of what this thing, and what is it going to unlock, and what are all the emotions we're trying to tap into here, and uncover here.

Molly:

And give way more value first.

Brett:

Yeah. Yeah. How do you do that? So kind of blending some of those principles, it's super powerful and it's definitely helped Boom get to where it is today without a doubt. Cool. We've got a few additional things I want to talk about, and not a whole lot of time to do it-

Molly:

Brett, hold on. I want to add one more thing. This is one of the biggest reasons that you might be failing to scale as an e-commerce business. If you are only relying on the people that are clicking from a Facebook ad, and directly converting and buying a product, you're missing out on a huge part of your market that just isn't ready to buy in the moment. If you're able to generate the lead, if you're able to nurture them via email, if you're able to set up a funnel where they get some sort of discount, especially if you add some scarcity, your scalability will increase in a way that you never understood, and it has absolutely nothing to do with your advertising. It's just that you are having a conversation with a different part of the market. That's all it is.

Molly:

So, if you are struggling to scale, it's probably not the ad platform, and B, the e-comm company that is willing to go outside of the box.

Brett:

Yeah, totally agree. It's not just I need to bid differently, I need a slightly different campaign structure in my ads manager or inside of Google Ads. Those things may be true, but often it comes down to offer and having the right funnel. Are we actually getting people to give us their email address and get a direct conversion as well? Do we have a nurture sequence? Do we have a remarketing sequence built in? All of those things really unlock the ability to scale rather than just "How do I bid differently or change my campaign structure?"

Molly:

Brett, I would say that your most successful clients, and the ones that you like working with the most are probably strong in this area. As an agency, that's a dream.

Brett:

No doubt. No doubt.

Molly:

The issue you usually have an agency is that you're great at running ads. You only have a few places to run ads to. There's only so much you can do.

Brett:

Yeah, that's one reason we love working with Boom.

Molly:

Just emphasize.

Brett:

You guys get it, and we're just able to work together and crush it. That's fantastic. Cool. Any quick insights, and I kind of designed this podcast series to have a long shelf life, but let's talk about a few trends. What's working right now, or what are some trends inside of Facebook ads that you're seeing right now?

Molly:

Good news is, as we do each year, we're seeing a huge decrease in ad cost at the beginning of the year. Almost 50% cheaper in most of our ad accounts in the analysis. We did over $60 million in spend than what we were seeing Q4, which is a huge relief with the dumpster fire that Facebook was the last six months of 2021.

Brett:

No doubt.

Molly:

That's a huge sigh of relief. We're also starting to see more accurate reporting, or at least I think we're all getting better as marketers getting our stuff together from a tracking standpoint. So, things are looking up, and we are working on offers, working on creative and copy right now so we can really take advantage of the next few months of cheap traffic, and try to do everything we can to set us up for a big Q4 again this year.

Brett:

I love it. Just one thing to keep in mind, this is going to likely always be the trend. Advertisers panic in fourth quarter because costs are going through the roof. But the costs are going to come back down in Q1, so be planning, and be thinking about that, and what's your acquisition strategy going to be in Q1 and then as you lead into and get ramped up for Q4. So, that's awesome.

Brett:

Any other specific trends you want to talk about now? I also want to dig into a mindset just a little bit, which will be fun.

Molly:

Really quick, I wouldn't say this is necessarily a new trend for right now, but it's something we've been preaching for a few years that I just literally cannot emphasize enough. I was actually just on a training call with some of our students, and one of them sells physical products. He's in the snack and wellness space. His Facebook ad results that I was looking at were incredible, $0.04 clicks, 15% click through rate, $3.00 add to cart, numbers I have not seen in years.

Molly:

Guess what he's doing from an ad perspective? It's native advertising. It's user-generated content. It is simply telling stories about people in their own words the experience that they had not even specifically with your product. This was a weight loss product. So, his best performing ad was a picture of a beach with an arrow to a certain area of the beach. The copy was telling a story from the customer's standpoint of, "Last year I went to this beach and I couldn't even walk up the stairs without getting out of breath. I felt terrible, and my health wasn't great. This year, 12 months later, I've gone back to this beach. I've lost 90 pounds. I was able to run around, and I really enjoyed myself."

Molly:

Those weren't the exact words, but that's how simple it was. It wasn't an ad about the product. It wasn't an ad about how great this product was. Absolutely nothing about features. Really, not even a lot of benefits other than the benefits that were woven into the story. This isn't necessarily new, but it's what people are still missing out on when it comes to Facebook and Instagram. These are true social platforms. People are used to engaging with stories from family and friends. Use imagery and copy that is that. It's really that simple.

Brett:

I love it. I don't really ever see that changing. We spend a lot of on YouTube and running YouTube ads, and we're seeing similar things in that videos, and usually you need slightly longer videos on YouTube than you do on Facebook in most cases, but still that user-generated content, those testimonial videos that you could weave into your YouTube ad works there too. I think it's always going to work. As long as it's an authentic, genuine testimonial that really hits on "Here's how my life has changed. Here's why I love this product. Here's my story," people eat that up. I think people will always eat that up if it rings authentic.

Molly:

Because it's a testimonial, that's not what makes it work. We chat about this and then students submit a testimonial, and the first line is "I love this product so much." It's like, guys that's words of customer, but it sounds like an ad. We need to start with things like, "As a mom of two, I didn't think I would have time to do X, Y, and Z." How much more relatable is that? It doesn't feel like you are being sold to.

Brett:

Yeah, one time we had a prospect, and we ended up not working with him. He submits these videos and you could literally read the people that are supposed to be customers. You could watch their eyes reading from a teleprompter. I'm like, "Guys, this not going to work." You want people to be sharing real emotion and their real story.

Molly:

Yeah, well sharing a life story. It's not about why the product's great. It is sharing their story and how it fit into their lives. So, we ask three important questions to get really good testimonials. If you ask these questions, it will set people up to give you really good answers. What was life like before you bought this product? That has them describe that undesirable before state, starts to tell their story. What is life like afterwards? Now they're talking about the after state, the benefits, how much better they feel. Then if you were to re-commend this to a friend, what exactly would you say? When you say it like that, they take off their "I'm a salesperson for this company" hat, and they put on their "Oh, I'm writing a message, or speaking a message to a friend. I'm going to be real about how this product helped me."

Brett:

Love that so much. Actually, since I'm such a believer in testimonials, but getting authentic ones, I created "The Ultimate Guide", I don't remember what I called it, but how to get authentic customer testimonials. It's on the OMG Commerce website. Check it out. I'm not sure if I have those exact [crosstalk 00:40:34]-

Molly:

That's sounds like a good offer for your agency, Brett.

Brett:

It's a good offer. Yeah. We can do that as an offer too for Smart Marketer. It's so true. The difference between a really good testimonial and then an average testimonial is two different planets, two different universes. Getting a good testimonial is worth it's weight in gold. Having one that's average, is really going to do nothing for you, or one that's weak. Anyway, I love that.

Brett:

What was life like before? What was life like after? What would you say to a friend? I love that so much. It's also good, you want to give someone a little bit of help as they're creating a testimonial. Otherwise, it feels like they're staring at a screen and not knowing what to say, or looking at a blank page or whatever. So, giving them some help is key, for sure. I love that. Love that.

Brett:

Let's take just a couple of minutes, and we're going to be short-changing this topic for sure, but I wanted to take a couple of minutes because this will be fun and I think it's useful. It's been a difficult road the last couple of years for e-commerce, entrepreneurs, media buyers, online advertisers, not rough [crosstalk 00:41:47]. E-commerce has grown tremendously. That's been good. E-commerce has grown, so no complaints there.

Brett:

But it's challenging times. I know you train a lot of people, you train a lot of entrepreneurs and media buyers. What are you teaching people about mindset and how mindset impacts results?

Molly:

Mindset is everything in this game. I don't think any of us are maybe even better marketers than one another. It's your willingness to stay committed, and to continue forward. It's what we talked about earlier with us being okay with half of the work we do not actually being used. Or as a media buyer, it's not even about who can set up the best ads. It's about who can continue to troubleshoot and optimize to make each piece of the campaign better so that they can move forward.

Molly:

This is personal development, a concept that most of you have heard of before, but it's really the difference between having a scarcity mindset, or having an abundance mindset. For me, I choose to be grateful. I choose to not get upset with these paid traffic platforms. I choose to look at things with the glass half full. I think that if there was anything unique about our culture at Smart Marketer, that is it. We have all chosen this mindset.

Molly:

There is going to be trouble in anything you do. I think as a human, the last few years have been hard. It's easy to get down. Of course, I still get frustrated, angry, depressed. All of those things occur. But I try to choose to bring positivity to our business, try to bring it to our employees, to our offers, to the trainings that we provide. It really is a completely different experience when you choose to do that.

Brett:

Yeah, I love it. I'm a really positive person. I'm naturally upbeat. I'm a glass half full kind of guy. But I have my moments. I have moments where I want to curse Tim Cook for the latest iOS update, and why are you killing a good thing, Tim Cook? Or whoever else is making the decisions at Apple. We can get in that mindset. It's okay to be frustrated and complain a little bit, but don't stay there.

Brett:

Get to a better place, because you're right, it's not just who's the smartest, it's not just who has the best campaign structure, but who can show up consistently and do the right thing, and who can be okay with "Okay, I got one, two, three campaigns that I wrote that didn't work, but then I had an offer that hit and then it scaled to the moon." Who could handle that?

Molly:

And who-

Brett:

Yeah, please add to that.

Molly:

[inaudible 00:44:31], and who actually cares? It's why I so believe-

Brett:

Exactly.

Molly:

... in the mission of our business that Ezra initially set out, serve the world unselfishly, and profit. If you truly care about the group of people that your business serves, and you care about the way that you're changing their lives, even if you're selling a toothbrush and you're helping their mouth to be cleaner, it doesn't matter. If you truly care about that, it changes the energy of the business.

Molly:

I can tell you, if you asked me "Molly, what is the difference between students that succeed or don't succeed, or friends that I know in the industry that have done great things, or people that are struggling," it really comes back to mindset, and it comes back to an authentic, genuine, caring for the group of people that you're serving. If you have that, and you stay consistent, there's no way that you can't make this work.

Brett:

Yeah, it's so true. If you can really be passionate about your customer, and I would even say about your team, then that's way more powerful than just being passionate about your product. I think both are important, but being passionate about your customer and about your team, that's really where's it at. One thing I discovered for me, and hey I've got lofty goals, I want my business to succeed and I want to it to grow, I think entrepreneurship, and businesses, and capitalism offer a lot to the world. If it's just about money, I burn out quickly. I get to a point where I'm like, "I don't really care anymore."

Brett:

But if I think about who I'm serving, and I think about that business owner that my agency is helping accelerate growth for, if I think about team members who were helping accelerate their individual growth, and I get to see someone step and lead a call, or mail a presentation, or come up with a strategy.

Molly:

Nothing better.

Brett:

I'm like "Whoa, I never thought of that." That is so fun for me, and so rewarding. Then when you key in on that, then guess what, the profits are better too, and then the business grows better too.

Molly:

Brett, aside from the money, I saw a study last year that rated digital marketing as the most stressful job or career path out there, even above brain surgeons, or people working in the medical field.

Brett:

That's crazy, yeah.

Molly:

I believe that. Think about it, we're basically day traders.

Brett:

[crosstalk 00:46:47] so much out of your control, and that's a scary thing. There's so much out of your control, it's scary. Yeah.

Molly:

Exactly. To be able to sustain that, and the changes, and the stress, and the fact that what we do never really turns off unless you choose for it to do so your mindset and who you are as a person, and how you treat yourself and the people around you, that is will what will sustain you moving forward more than anything else.

Brett:

Love that. So good. So good, Molly Pittman. All right, so people that are listening that are like, "Holy cow, I need more Molly Pittman in my life," where do you suggest people go? Obviously, there's lots of stuff people are going to enjoy at SmartMarketer.com, but where should someone get started, or what are some cool things, what are some offers you got going on right now?

Molly:

Yeah, check out SmartMarketer.com. There are some free resources there, depending on what we have going on at the time. I know this is coming out a bit later, Brett, so we do have that State of Paid Advertising in 2022 workshop coming up. We have lots of free resources on our website. If you want to follow me, I'm most active on Instagram @MollyPittmanDigital. I also read all of my DMs, so if you have questions, thoughts about this, I love hearing from you all and I would love to hear from you on Instagram.

Brett:

Instagram, check it out. What's your handle again?

Molly:

One more quick thing, Brett.

Brett:

What's your handle again on Instagram?

Molly:

@MollyPittmanDigital.

Brett:

@MollyPittmanDigital.

Molly:

Of course, if you like this format, you like podcasts, John, and Ezra, and I do have a podcast, The Smart Marketer Podcast. So, check that out.

Brett:

It is an intact podcast, where you get to be a guest for a couple of episodes. It was tremendously fun. Check out the Smart Marketer podcast. I'll link to all of this in the show notes as well so it's easy for you to access. With that, Molly Pittman, any final words? Any final words of wisdom, re-commendations, or asks of the audience?

Molly:

Keep doing it. Just keep at it. Take care of yourself. Maintain that balance in your life. Don't get sucked into this world so that you lose who you are. Or if you do, quickly bounce back from that. Just enjoy. We're living in a really cool time as humans, and there's a lot of crazy stuff going on. When have we ever had the opportunity to do what we're doing from a business standpoint?

Molly:

It's complicated, but also the world is truly at our fingertips. Find a group of people that you align with, that you're interested in, that you want to help, and figure out how you can serve them, and figure out what you can sell to them. I just always go back to being grateful that we are able to work in this way. It's really, really cool. Hopefully, you guys enjoy it too.

Brett:

I love it. It's a super challenging industry. It's always changing. It's very stressful. But man, it's fun. It can be fun, especially if you have the right community around you. If you can find that balance man, it's an awesome place to be. Check out Smart Marketer. Check out the community. Get to know Molly Pittman. Follow her on Instagram.

Brett:

With that, thank you so much for tuning in. This show would be nothing without you who tune in and listen faithfully. If you haven't rated the show, please do that. Leave a review. It helps other people find the show. If there's somebody that you're listening to this and you're like, "Whoa, this person needs to hear this episode," then share with them. That would mean the world to me, and I know it'd make a difference in somebody else's life as well.

Brett:

With that, until next time, stay spicy.

‍